It's Time - Bury Bonds

I love baseball. I’ve always contended that you can’t be a real sports fan if you don’t like baseball. You can be a football fan or a basketball fan, but to be a genuine sports fan you have to appreciate the game of baseball.

It’s been said that the hardest thing to do in sports is to try to use a round bat to squarely hit a round baseball being thrown at 90+ MPH. But the appeal of the game goes beyond that. In baseball, with only a handful of exceptions, there are no “plays”. It’s an unpredictable game – every time the pitcher throws a pitch there’s no certainty as to what will happen next. Anything can happen; the batted ball can go anywhere and once it does, multiple options arise instantaneously.

And, unlike football, basketball and hockey, there’s no clock – “It ain’t over till it’s over,” as Yogi, the Cooperstown sage, said. Each game is finished only when it has been decided by the 18 guys on the field. There are no ties; no timed overtime periods; no contrived or convoluted sudden-death rules. They just play until one team wins. It’s a great game.

But two forces have entered the game of baseball and they threaten to bring it down to just another … whatever. First is the logical extension of free agency, which in and of itself isn’t a bad thing. But it has led to a fundamental alteration of the game. Players move from team to team, as often as every couple of years, with only rare hints of allegiance to a franchise or a city and its fans. They market their skills to the highest bidder, period. A few get ridiculously wealthy, earning up to $25 million a year to play a sport that Little Leaguers also play. The message to the fans is, “Don’t take it personally; it’s just business.” Indeed, it’s a business. Businesses are good and valuable, but who buys a ticket to watch one of them? The more a sport morphs into a rotating group of employees just putting in their hours at work and going home, the less appeal it will have to the real working stiffs in America.

The second impact, which is a much greater threat, is from drugs and steroids. Even if the players rotate from team to team, fans can still go “root, root, root for the home team,” because at least the ballparks and uniforms are familiar and the spirit of the competition between cities lives on. But, drugs and steroids can kill the spirit of the game by killing the spirit of the competition. Performance enhancing drugs and steroids are used by only one kind of ballplayer – the cheaters.

Cheaters are a horrific drain of energy and spirit, in sports, in business or in any other endeavor. We learned that fact in grade school, which is where we also learned how to react to cheaters. We hold them in great disdain. Nobody likes them. Cheaters are thieves – they are stealing something they’re not entitled to have, and, of course, that means they’re taking it away from someone else.

My family, like others around the country, was riveted by the home run race in 1998, when Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa were chasing after Roger Maris’ 1961 season home run mark. Both of them passed Maris’ hallowed 61; Sosa finished with 66 and McGwire set a new standard with 70. It felt good.

Then we watched McGwire appear before Congress and refuse to answer questions about his use of steroids. McGwire had repeatedly denied using steroids, but when placed under oath before the House Government Reform Committee on March 17, 2005, he declined to repeat that denial. His inability to deny such use while invoking his constitutional right against self-incrimination left us with little doubt on the question. Then we watched Sosa, who appeared at the same hearing for the same inquiry, get caught using a corked bat. With that, the numbers 66 and 70 became seriously suspect and the spirit of competition began to leave the building. But, those numbers didn’t matter as much as they could have because in the interim (2001) a new number had been posted at the top of baseball’s home run scrapheap – 73. And that brings us to Barry Bonds, baseball’s version of Public Enemy No. 1, the cheater extraordinaire.

There’s no need to repeat the almost countless charges and allegations about Bond’s use of steroids. Except for the most die-hard and mentally impaired Giants fan, there are few if any people in or around baseball who think this guy is clean. His body is prosecution Exhibit “A”. Now we learn that a federal grand jury is hearing testimony about whether Bonds perjured himself in 2003 in an appearance before another grand jury in the BALCO scandal. In that testimony Bonds admitted that his trainer gave him a rubbing balm and a liquid substance he called "the cream" and "the clear". The source of those substances, BALCO founder Victor Conte, identified "the clear" as the designer steroid THG, and prosecutors contended "the cream” was a testosterone-based ointment. Bonds claims that at the time he didn’t think these things were steroids. He later defended himself by saying he "unwillingly" used steroids. Yeah, right. Poor, dumb, Barry – just another unwitting victim of … whatever.

We can sense the spirit leaving baseball’s weary body.

Bonds currently has 708 home runs, a career total that only trails behind the Babe’s 714 and Hammering Hank’s 755. The three of them don’t belong in the same sentence, much less in the same record book. Bonds has already surpassed a long list of other players who should file a class action lawsuit to have his name struck from the records. Anticipating that the commissioner of baseball will eventually have no choice but to employ the dreaded asterisk for any future reference to Bonds’ stats, sportswriter Bill Chuck has already dubbed him Barry B*nds. If only that were funny.

Cheaters should be given an “F”, not an “*”. If Bonds isn’t tried for perjury or some other drug-related charge, he should be charged with felony theft. He and others like him have attempted to steal the competitive spirit in baseball. That’s a crime against every Little Leaguer who has tried to hit a round ball with a round bat.

With the spirit of baseball leaving its weary body, it’s time to bury Bonds before we end up burying the game.