Everybody Whiffs in the Barry Bonds Steroid Saga

Barry Bonds, dragging his aching, 43-year-old body through another long baseball season, is on the verge of breaking Hank Aaron's all-time home run record. In fact, he's been on the verge for some time now. He'll get there, eventually.

And when he does, well, he does. He's been a helluva player for a long, long time and his knocking at the door of baseball's most cherished record is not entirely a fluke. (The fact that he's a helluva jerk, too, is beside the point. He'll be in good company when he enters the Hall of Fame, that's for sure.)

But all that pious bleating about steroids, whether it comes from the corporate boardrooms of Major League Baseball or one of the amped-up frat boys at ESPN, stinks like three-day-old fish. Commissioner Bud Selig's coy "maybe-I'll-show-up-for-Barry's-big-moment-and-maybe-I-won't" act was simply pathetic.

After all, these are the people who helped create the hyper-competitive climate that encouraged Bonds, and all the others, to do what they did.

Did Bonds use performance-enhancing drugs? Can anybody seriously doubt it? You don't bloat up like the Hindenburg and suddenly grow a few hat sizes larger just by stuffing yourself with Ding Dongs. (Well, you might bloat up like the Hindenburg.) And it's a bit suspicious that Bonds was well into his 30s before undergoing his remarkable growth spurt (along with a corresponding rise in his home run totals).

Same with Mark McGwire. He was a rangy beanpole when he reported to his first spring training with the Oakland A's. Look at him now. Even in retirement, he's a freaking cartoon. Popeye with a goatee, and taking the Fifth every time someone asks him a pointed question.

Of course these chowderheads are juiced.

But you know what? This whole society is juiced. We're the Steroid Nation. Everything is inflated here. Go to a restaurant. Look at all that food. There's enough there on one plate to feed a family of four. Look at the daily business section. Is Google stock really worth that much? Look at Donald Trump and Larry Ellison and Bill Gates. Does anyone really need that much money? For that matter, does Alex Rodriguez need $152 million for playing a game?

So Barry Bonds and Mark McGwire and Jason Giambi and the hundred-and-a-half other guys who bulked up were merely doing what the prevailing values of modern America told them to do. Maximize. Optimize. Monetize. Exploit. Since when has cheating for profit or gain ever been a sin in this country? These guys shouldn't be demonized. They should be held up as shining examples of the American entrepreneurial spirit.

Unless, of course, that spirit is really broken and needs to be fixed.

Steroid use is now banned by professional baseball and by every other major international sports federation. Good. It should be. These drugs not only skew the statistics that are so vital to the traditions of a game like baseball, but in the wrong hands they're dangerous. They should be illegal and anyone caught using them should be kicked out of the sport for good.

Things were more ambiguous in 1998, though, when Bonds' steroid use allegedly began. For one thing, everyone turned a blind eye to it, including the people in charge. No doubt Bonds knew that what he was doing was, at the very least, unethical. But he also knew that others were doing it, with impunity, and if he wanted to remain a top slugger he'd have to join the queue. And if Bonds was juiced, it's a safe bet that a lot of the pitchers he's faced over the past 10 seasons were juiced, too.

There's nothing like a guy who's still throwing 97 mph seeds in the seventh inning to gladden the heart of a ballclub's marketing department.

So instead of launching a witch hunt against Bonds because of what he's about to do, it makes more sense to acknowledge the achievement -- which is considerable under any circumstances -- then draw the line and move on.

Maybe when baseball players begin shrinking back to the size of normal people, the game will still have room for the good gloveman who hits only .247 but can bunt a guy over, and for the closer whose fastball tops out at 86 mph but keeps the hitters guessing. Then the game will go back to relying on pitching skill rather than raw power, and a new generation of fan will come to appreciate that a triple into the alley is more exciting than a home run.

There's no doubt that Bonds' homers have traveled a lot farther in the second half of his career than they did in the first. We're pretty sure why that is. But if steroids make you stronger, that's all they do. They do nothing for hand-eye coordination or visual perception, the most important ingredients (along with bat speed, which is at least partly an acquired mechanical skill) that go into the making of a great hitter. Those gifts are there from the start. Either you have them or you don't. If you don't, some Poindexter in a lab coat can't give them to you.

Bonds has these gifts, in spades. Even without the chemical enhancements, he'd have a boatload of home runs and would be a first-ballot Hall of Famer.

Leave it to misapplied science (and greed, that destroyer of all things good) to screw up the most poetic, perfectly conceived game of them all.

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Tony Long is copy chief at Wired News.

http://www.wired.com/culture/lifestyle/commentary/theluddite/2007/08/luddite_0802