The Home Run Champion of the Steroid Era

I watched the first two at-bats, a double and a single, both smashed hard, and you didn't have to be Kreskin to know that Bonds was going to break the record momentarily, but I went to bed and missed it (great job by Dave Sheinin and the Sports desk on a tight deadline). See the video package here. And this excellent blog entry from Svrluga.

I'm shedding no tears this morning for being asleep during the big sports moment. Tony and Mike in one of their video chats recently had it about right: It's hard to know what the record means. Baseball more than any sport is defined by statistics, records, historical comparisons. But what do any of the slugging numbers mean in the steroid era? McGwire hitting 70 the year Sosa hit 66: In retrospect that was ludicrous. And ludicrous doesn't even begin to describe Bonds hitting 73 in 2001.

The way you break the all-time home record, Hank Aaron taught us way back when, is to sustain greatness for more than two decades, remain healthy, and somehow avoid the erosion of skills that befalls most players after the age of 35. But Bonds did something different: After the age of 35 he became the Hulk. He became a completely different player. This coincided with his involvement with a trainer implicated in a steroid ring. Somehow I don't think he was just eating his Wheaties.

Baseball is a beautifully designed game (sorry to sound like Boz or George Will) in which the dimensions of the diamond and the ballpark are carefully calibrated. Throw one dimension out of whack and you can ruin the game. That's why purists don't like baseball at a mile above sea level in Colorado: To compensate for thinner air, you need to move the fences farther from home plate, but that in turn creates oversized outfields that can't be patrolled effectively with three players. (Chaos ensues. Cats and dogs sleeping together, human sacrifices, etc.) When players began going to the chemist for their nutrition it was like yanking the outfield fences 40 feet toward home plate.

Today, with steroids in retreat, a lot of players have had a sudden power outage. Look at the Nats: Ryan Zimmerman leads the team with 17 home runs. And this is August. The team may finish the year without anyone reaching even 25 homers. The leader in the NL home run derby is at 33, a modest number. A-Rod has 36 to lead the AL. The game has been recalibrated: It has become, again, the game that Aaron played.

Aaron showed class (as always) in congratulating Bonds. He knows, and we know, and maybe even Bonds knows, that Aaron's 755 home runs are more authentic than the 756 of Bonds. Bonds himself was as combative as ever in the post-game press conference. Selig's statement was lawyerly and dull -- it didn't seem appropriate to the moment.

I think that home run ball is going to be worth more than $13:

According to Giants officials, Murphy merely was stopping over in San Francisco on his way to a vacation in Australia, and had purchased his ticket (face value: $13) outside the gates on the day of the game.

As for Bonds, maybe it was the bat all along:

On a 3-2 count in the bottom of the fifth inning, Bonds swung that custom-made, double-lacquered, Canadian toothpick of a maple bat of his and sent Bacsik's fastball about six rows into the right-center field seats -- and into baseball history.

Read Gene Wojciechowski's column and watch how it changes tone: He can't sustain the this-is-historic narrative any longer:

... in the end, I can't pretend because I believe in the purity of Aaron's numbers, but not in coincidences. What Bonds has done, as his body has morphed from a lithe, ungodly athletic rookie into a Silver Surfer lookalike, was no coincidence. I believe it was cheating. Rationalize and justify all you want, but Bonds had a choice. And I believe he chose to cheat...

Bonds and his career numbers are a fraud. Just like McGwire's. Just like Rafael Palmeiro's. Just like Sammy Sosa's. Bonds wasn't the first to take steroids and performance enhancers, but he's the first to overtake Aaron. And that's why you should care.

Here's one of the many (mostly rancorous) comments posted by readers of ESPN's Wojo:

Barry Bonds' Average, Slugging% and AB per HR... from ages 26-30: .310 / .603 / 13.9; from 31-35: .294 / .600 / 13.2; from 36-40: .339 / .781 / 8.2. Can anyone name another athlete in any sport who made the jump from ELITE to OTHER WORLDLY at such an age without steroids? The list of clean athletes who even MAINTAINED their ELITE status from 36-40 is extremely short (mostly jockeys and golfers). Barry Bonds CRUSHES the merely ELITE at that age. For those of you who claim Barry Bonds is clean, how much greater would his numbers have to be for you to say, "Ok... maybe that isn't humanly possible."? In court, Bonds is PRESUMED innocent until proven guilty. But this isn't a courtroom... common sense is enough.

You know my take on Bonds -- see the pieces posted a couple of days ago, plus this one, saying that, despite his sins, he should still be in the Hall of Fame:

No one has ever done what Barry Bonds did at the plate. Even in a league rife with steroids he has stood out as leaps and bounds better than everyone else. That's why he has to go into the Hall even if people think that he's a steroid cheater. We judge athletes against their competition. Even steroids don't let your average superstar win seven, count 'em, seven MVP awards. If steroids make such a big difference than how come Jose Canseco never reached 500 home runs for his career? Canseco never managed to hit 50 home runs in a season, much less the 73 that Bonds hit to set that all-time record. Bonds has inspired more fear in pitchers than Canseco, McGwire and Sosa combined. He became, in his late 30s, so dangerous at the plate that he deformed the basic principles of pitching. Last year he walked 232 times, which is absurd, and by far the all-time record, but what's stunning is that, of those, 120 were "intentional" walks, meaning the pitcher didn't even pretend to want to pitch to him. Pitchers basically gave up.

Even if we believe that Bonds took steroids and that by doing so betrayed the game, the fact of the matter is that Bonds has been at the center of the steroid controversy not because he abused them in any special way. It's because he's a lot better than everyone else.

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