Years ago, we posed a question about a question, wondering how the court of public opinion, along with the guardians of baseball, might have dealt with Barry Bonds had he answered affirmatively when a federal grand jury asked him in
Years ago, we posed a question about a question, wondering how the court of public opinion, along with the guardians of baseball, might have dealt with Barry Bonds had he answered affirmatively when a federal grand jury asked him in December 2003 about his use of performance-enhancing drugs.
What if Bonds, we asked, had said that he had surrendered to steroid use because it had practically become an institutionalized necessity, the key to unlocking the door to statistical and lifestyle riches?
And that his involvement was influenced by nothing less sacred than a pursuit of the American Dream, all pumped up?
In 2006, Fay Vincent, the former baseball commissioner, told us: “We are a terrifically forgiving country, in part because we have such a low standard of morality. But I’ve thought about this question a lot, and I believe that people would have forgiven Barry Bonds.”
The people, Vincent apparently meant, who were cheering admitted steroid user Jason Giambi for launching parabolic home runs at the old Yankee Stadium; the baseball executives in St. Louis and Los Angeles who ultimately welcomed a belatedly contrite Mark McGwire back into the game as a hitting coach; and the many, including a new commissioner, Rob Manfred, now making nice with Alex Rodriguez as he powers his way to the kind of season Bonds had in 2007 — 28 home runs, a .480 on-base percentage — while turning 42, before the sport lost his number and he moved on to stubbornly stare down the government.
“He could have spared himself and baseball so much by just coming clean,” Vincent said of Bonds in 2006, adding: “I never thought it should be about punishment. What good would that do?”
Finally, after an expensive, decade-plus chase of Bonds, baseball’s record-holder for home runs in a career (762) and single season (73), even the government gave up trying to pin the rap on Bonds. A one-paragraph motion by the U.S. Justice Department announced Tuesday that Solicitor General Donald B. Verrilli Jr. would not ask the Supreme Court to review an appellate decision that overturned Bonds’ obstruction-of-justice conviction in 2011.
Consider this latest development a metaphorical walk-off blast off the bat of Bonds, but also a possible way forward for a sport still trying to find a road less potholed on the subject of performance enhancement. Finally free of legal entanglement, Bonds could, or should, become the example by which baseball can bring greater clarity to its moral ambiguity and ever-shifting standards that are now being applied to the multitude of high-end achievers from a tarnished era.
That group includes the admitted users and others who were entrapped by a test, or guilt by association, or mere suspicion. It also includes the newly triumphant Bonds, the all-time champion of dingers and denials. Beyond his amicable relationship with the San Francisco Giants, his former team, he now merits acceptance somewhere else — in Cooperstown, courtesy of a 2016 election to the Hall of Fame.
It has long been argued that Bonds had pretty much earned a spot in the Hall as Skinny Barry, with a decade’s worth of greatness before the 1998 preponderance of steroid benefits produced by McGwire and Sammy Sosa seemingly, and rather infamously, went to Bonds’ head.
What came after was surely a distortion of his previously immaculate statistics. But in the context of continued revelations about baseball’s culture — foremost among them the Mitchell report, which fingered Roger Clemens and shattered all notions of steroids as primarily a slugger’s scourge — the achievements of the bloated Bonds can no longer be permanently and completely discredited, viewed in a vacuum.
“The Bonds story may be the most complicated moral question of our sporting times,” said Stephen Mosher, a professor of sports management and media at Ithaca College. “It’s about an institution that wants to punish these guys, but was also an institution that more or less encouraged them by turning a blind eye to what they were doing to keep the cash registers ringing.”
Bonds’ case, he added, “is even more complicated because of the records he shattered, the curmudgeonly personality he is.”
Mosher added, “He’s in limbo — and probably will be after our lifetime, and his.”
That would be a shame for baseball as much as it would for Bonds because the sport needs less rigid thinking and more enlightened contemplation as it grapples with a problem that isn’t going away and is only likely to create more confusion, along with new culprits.
Baseball’s original sin wasn’t that it had — and certainly still has — athletes surreptitiously seeking an edge. It was management’s willful neglect of the problem for the sake of profits, along with an obstructionist union wrongfully working to shield the guilty at the expense of the innocent.
Allowing journalists to apply personal ideologies and ethics is not an acceptable standard. For one thing, they have for too long made the Hall out to be something it’s not, and never was — a shrine for the morally and behaviorally superior.
Promptly voting in Bonds, who most people believe did take performance enhancers late in his career, would at least establish a precedent for admitting those locked in that holding pen of grudge-holding and guesswork. It would not mean that everyone whose numbers were artificially inflated would follow.
Would Bonds be rewarded for stonewalling, even lying under oath? That was never proved. What we surely do know is that baseball’s hierarchy failed not only its public but its players by pretending, for years, that the concept of performance enhancement did not exist, when other sports were long into testing. Then it tried to play tough cop, letting players take all the heat.
For many, it would no doubt be painful to hear an induction speech from Bonds, Clemens and the like. But wasn’t the notion of A-Rod again circling the bases after all that went down equally distasteful just months ago? Now what you hear is that he’s a great teammate who served his time, paid his dues.
So, in many ways, has Bonds, albeit with a smirk or a sneer. But how he has acted is not the point in the grand scheme. He deserves to be in the Hall, and baseball deserves to have him there, to deal more realistically, or honestly, with the industry’s original sin.
