All That Makes It Great: Barry Bonds and the Biggest Mistake We Could Ever Make

Picture your all time favorite baseball hero. See him in your mind. That one player who, since you can remember, has been the center of your every sports fantasy. Remember how your heart leapt and broke with his triumphs and failures. How your mood fluctuated with his batting average. How your pride and joy was memorizing his line stats in the paper every morning and reciting them effortlessly to the kids on the playground.

Now imagine that man being hated: his accomplishments belittled by nearly every magazine, newspaper, broadcast personality and fan across the nation. Imagine the commissioner of baseball himself saying that he will not be present when your boy finally comes trotting down the third base line towards home plate and a permanent spot atop the pantheon of American sports icons. Imagine your boyhood savior’s entire legacy reduced to swindling embarrassment because of matters unrelated to sports. Does it hurt?

Now picture this. It is nearly irrefutable fact that within a matter of weeks (perhaps even days) Giants’ slugger, Barry Bonds will surpass Henry Aaron and become the all-time home run king of Major League Baseball… Does that hurt? Odds are that if you are a baseball fan and not a resident of San Francisco, California it does. If it doesn’t, you probably at least conform to the widely accepted disdain for a man who has come to symbolize all that is soulless and wrong with America’s favorite pastime.

To the casual fan or outsider this storybook-like image of one man being responsible above all others for baseball’s most zeitgeist problem, demands no second thought. But let us first review the facts before accepting the above: The system for testing major leaguers for illegal substances has been established by Major League baseball and Bud Selig (commissioner of the MLB). The latter made that system more rigorous two years ago solely because of pressures from congress to do so. Even after said changes, the current policy is a complete joke. While a fifty game suspension for a first offence and a lifetime ban for a third offence would seem to be fairly adequate consequences, the odds of being tested are outrageously slim. Furthermore, testing takes place uniquely during the off-season and athletes are not only made aware of the list of players that may be tested, but are also given the dates between which those players might be subjected to such a test.

So how does all of this relate back San Fran’s big number twenty-five and our obsession with sticking him on the cover of the steroid era? Well, try this on for size: Barry Bonds has never tested positive for steroids or performance-enhancing drugs of any kind under Major League Baseball’s testing policy. In light of this oft-overlooked detail, how could it be that this particular player has been singled out above the hundreds of others suspected of using performance-enhancing drugs? And why has Bonds been painted as the lone bad guy of baseball’s steroid fiasco? The answer: because Barry Bonds is the perfect antagonist for fans, the media and big league baseball from a strictly off field perspective, and not from a baseball point of view.

First of all, it is no secret the Barry Bonds is far from the most personable of individuals. His refusal to cooperate with the media and even his own team (Bonds has for some time insisted on working with his own private trainers and doctors, therein abandoning franchise cooperation and distancing himself from his teammates) has long since put a fan and media bull’s-eye on his back. The 2006 release of Game of Shadows, an investigative report on “Barry Bonds, BALCO and the steroid scandal that rocked professional sports”, was for many the final assertion of Bonds’ true, dislikable colors. The book, in addition to strongly suggesting the slugger’s frequent use of anabolic steroids and HGH, revealed love affairs, shady dealings with trainers behind gyms and violent tendencies towards both his mistress and others who at times seem to aggravate him. Bonds’ every day, disagreeable personality combined with the lack of support from his teammates, spawned from such, has made Barry an easy target for fan disdain and media hatred.

Another, more structural element of the Barry Bonds saga is the context of the record he is up against. The current all time home run leader is Henry Aaron, an athlete respected for his longevity and consistency of play. “Hank” was the NL MVP in 1957, won three Gold Glove awards as an outfielder and made a stunning twenty-four all-star game appearances (a record no player has yet to approach). More pertinently however, Aaron’s career spanned from 1954-1976. His hay-day and passing of Babe Ruth’s historic threshold happened in the opening days of the 1974 season. Isn’t it curious then, that the vast majority of contemporary sports writers and broadcast personalities are currently between the ages of thirty-five and sixty? Hmm… just the group of young baseball fans who would have grown up treating Aaron as (to quote myself) “the center of their every sports fantasy”. It seems then that history, as it so often does, repeats itself. Aaron was also faced with opposition from the powers-that-were, when he threatened to break The Babe’s most hallowed record. Because the men whose opinions were heard around the sporting world at that time grew up idolizing Ruth, they were equally reluctant to see their respective all-time favorite player be surpassed.

This is the cue for an ardent anti-Bonds advocate to bring race into the discussion: “Well the people who didn’t want to see Hank break the record were bigots, opposed to a black man beating a white man, not the broadcasters of the time. Barry hasn’t had to deal with any race-based discrimination!” my father for example might say in a smug, resolute tone. Sorry dad, but not true. Another hugely important part of Bonds’ being cast in the role of villain is in fact the color of his skin. It is easy to praise professional sports in general, as genuinely diverse entities. That however would be nearly a complete fabrication. While the percentage of white players in the game has declined, there is a clearly disproportionate force driving African Americans out of and Hispanic players into Baseball.

This phenomenon has to do with fundamental economics. Take two seventeen year old, un-drafted, infinitely but equally promising, pitching prospects. On of these is a black kid from Chicago’s south side who has grown up knowing that if he makes it to “The Show” he will be paid an incredible sum of money and made into a big star. The other is a poor Nicaraguan who grew up in a home with seven siblings and made his first glove out of a milk carton. Obviously then, a franchise interested in acquiring young pitching can make the same offer sound a whole lot sweeter to the Nicaraguan prospect than to the Chicagoan. This scenario is not some far off view of what might be, or the dealings of a few penny-pinching GMs, but a real look -albeit simplified- into what happens literally every day within major league franchises. The proof is that African Americans constitute a mere eleven percent of all major league players and than number is shrinking rapidly.

In other words, the contemporary relationship between the black community and Major League Baseball is suffering because of problems stemming from business and money; just the things that tend to sway public opinion via marketing, the press etc. Bonds, as the most notable member of the black community in baseball, has consequently absorbed the brunt of this confrontation, particularly in the eyes and hearts of the modern fan, media and Baseball official.

All of these topics of consideration – reputation, historical context, anatomical evidence (or lack thereof) and race – as sports or un-sports related as they may be, are nevertheless legitimate queries with the greatest player of this, and perhaps any other generation. None of us should be surprised that he is singled out. No one should question that he is held to a higher standard. As Winston Churchill so succinctly put it, “the price of greatness is responsibility” and it is altogether fitting and proper that Bonds should have to pay the price of responsibility.

But for heaven sakes, let the kids of this generation love the Ruth or the Aaron of their own time. Don’t deprive them of a hero who, at the end of the day, only wanted to excel more than anyone before him ever had. Because the moment we stop letting these men awe us is the moment that baseball loses its reason for being… and the game will have lost all that makes it great.