If and when Barry Bonds breaks Hank Aaron’s record for the most home runs in a career, the most significant record in all of professional sports will mean about as much as setting a record set on a particularly unrealistic video game on the easiest difficulty level.
The fact is, that Bonds, as well as numerous other athletes, are cheating. In particular, most people believe Bonds has injected himself and taken in pill form several different performance enhancing steroids.
The classic defense used by Bonds and his fans, is “but he passes drug tests!” The only issue with saying that, is that steroids are a whole different ballgame now. Bonds and others are taking “designer steroids,” made to beat the tests.
According to the, book , “Game of Shadows,” which is the biggest piece of evidence against Bonds and other athletes, Bonds’s personal trainer Greg Anderson says on tape that he had obtained steroids for Bonds that could beat the tests.
To me, what makes this so depressing is that Bonds was not always the lying, dirty, cheating scum that he is now. I know, its a pretty powerful indictment, but I for one am not particularly fond of how steroids are turning professional baseball into a game that involves no talent beyond lying. In my opinion, the athletes should leave the lying and deceiving to politicians.
Anyway, Bonds hit the majority of the home runs of his career before he began shooting up behind the toilets in the locker room in San Francisco. Okay, I’m making assumptions there-- I have no proof where he took them, maybe he shot up in the comfort of his own home.
It really is depressing though, to look at Bonds in the beginning of his career, and now. His rookie picture shows a lanky, tall and thin outfielder with a lot of promise. Now, at 42, he is beefy, and to the untrained or lazy observer, looks like a completely different player. Consider also that his beef-ization happened after Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa also allegedly took steroids, before McGwire broke the single season home run record, which Bonds would later re-break. According to “Game of Shadows,” the record was Bonds’s inspiration. Although McGwire also broke the record with the aid of steroids, although the public outrage at McGwire was non-existent mainly because it was not known that he was dirty.
In a way, you’ve got to feel a little sorry for Bonds. It must stink to be booed more than a national enemy at all of your away games. Then again, he kinda did it to himself by ruining baseball.
Despite what it seems like, I’m making no intention to single out Bonds, it’s just that he is the only druggy that’s about to break an important record. Heck, if I found out that the reason Brett Favre, the quarterback of the Green Bay Packers, has started 221 consecutive games was because he had been secretly injecting himself the elixir of life, I’d be willing to detest my hero. By the same token, if I found out that Kobe Bryant was injecting himself, I’d be ticked off at him too.
If Bonds does break the record, and here’s to hoping that he is stricken with a sudden outbreak of character and retires before he makes the title of Home Run King meaningless, there should be an asterisk next to his name in the record book. He should get credit for the mind-boggling number of homers he hit before he took steroids, and next to that number should go the asterisk, which would say that he hit more homers than Aaron, but he hit the rest when he was on steroids.
The following is a rewrite of Bob Dylan’s “The Times They Are A Changin’” written to convey the perilous state steroids have put baseball into.
Come gather round people, wherever you roam, and admit that the number of homers has grown, and accept that soon, old records will be gone, if baseball to you is worth saving, then cheer the clean players and boo the drugged ones, for baseball’s records, they are in danger.
