Bonds is MLB’s
He is Barry Bonds, which means he is 708 home runs in the big leagues and counting, about to pass Babe Ruth, just 47 home runs shy of Henry Aaron’s all-time home run record. You know what this makes Bonds, everywhere except San Francisco? It makes him baseball’s worst nightmare.
So far, and maybe forever, there is no positive steroid test with Bonds’ name attached to it. There has been a rumor around baseball for some time that Bonds might have tested positive in that original “survey” season of 2003. No such positive has ever surfaced, at least in public.
There is a list with more than 100 names on it, ballplayers’ names, from 2003. The Players Association is trying to hold on to that list; the government still wants it. These are the 100 or so dim bulbs of baseball who kept using steroids even when they knew testing was coming, maybe still convinced at that point that they were bulletproof, because of their union, where performance-enhancing drugs were concerned. And that doesn’t even count the ones who were using THG, then undetectable.
Maybe Bonds is on that list, maybe not. But whether he is or not, one thing does not change:
When he does break those records, Aaron’s record especially, there is going to be the feeling, with baseball fans everywhere, maybe even some Giants fans, that he had help getting there.
In a lot of ways, some of them symbolic, some real, the steroid era of baseball doesn’t end until Bonds’ career ends. Why? Because people think he did it, and not just accidentally, not just rubbing a steroid cream on himself and thinking it was flaxseed oil. We had betting slips with Pete Rose. So far, there is no such paper on Bonds.
So he will be the last one standing. Jason Giambi still will be around when Bonds is gone, but Giambi, as muscle-bound as he still is, is a small fry in the whole grand scheme of things compared to Barry Bonds, the greatest baseball player of his time, and one of the greatest of all time.
At least once next season - when Bonds passes Ruth - and then later on, maybe in September, if he passes Aaron, commissioner Bud Selig and Mr. Aaron himself will have to stand next to Bonds on the field and try to look as happy as the fans who are going to end up with the historic baseballs. If they can pull it off, all the other Best Actor nominees better look out at Oscar time.
Mark McGwire has disappeared from the public stage. Sammy Sosa won’t be far behind him. McGwire’s body broke down in a hurry at the end. So did Sosa’s. Fancy that. Rafael Palmeiro has become a pathetic figure as he tries to somehow preserve his Hall of Fame credentials now that the world has a positive steroid test on him, one announced after he pointed a finger at the Congress of the United States and said he’d never used steroids in his life.
Bonds, back now from one of the slowest healing knee injuries on record, isn’t going anywhere, at least until he leaves the game for good, leaves us with our doubts, or the firm belief that he did it, and might be still doing it. That he might be a step ahead of the testers the way he is a step ahead of all other players, with some concoction of human growth hormone, for which there still is no reliable test, and just enough testosterone that it doesn’t reach the threshold of a positive test.
We don’t know for sure and might never know for sure. We just know that Bonds said he used something known as “the clear” and “the cream” without knowing it was, and we know that his personal trainer, Greg Anderson, was as much a centerpiece of the BALCO case as was Victor Conte, and we have watched Bonds grow over the last 10 years the way his amazing numbers have.
The only way this changes is if there is a positive test with his name on it and someone can produce it. It would be a violation of Bonds’ privacy. It would. And some might say that if he has been using steroids over the past decade, as gifted a hitter and player as he was before that, then he goes to the head of the line with the drug cheats and deserves what he gets.
If Bonds cheated, he deserves what he gets from fans the way McGwire does, after the way McGwire took what the Boston Globe’s Bob Ryan calls “the Fourth-and-a-Half Amendment” in front of Congress. He deserves what Palmeiro has gotten since we got news of his positive test.
Baseball passed a big steroid policy last week, and that is what is really supposed to end the era of suspicion. Not as long as Barry Bonds keeps hitting them out of sight.
