What Barry Bonds Is and Is Not
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by user Darrel
A discussion of Barry Bonds and common sense can't go together. Barry Bonds has reached irrational status, like religion or abortion: it's rude to bring him up at the dinner table, and no one can quite explain just why they feel the way they do. I'm going to try to do the impossible and infuse common sense into the situation by laying the facts on the table.
Barry Bonds is not a saint. In fact, he's far from it. Most people would call Barry Bonds a jerk, and many would go farther than that. It's difficult to determine just how unlikeable Bonds is in person - after all, the only people that spend much time with him are his teammates, his family, and his girlfriends. The fact that he was kicked off his college team before the College World Series is pretty good evidence that he's a pretty big jerk.
Barry Bonds is a cheater. Those that disagree with that label either absurdly believe Barry's never taken steroids, or they quibble with the definition. Either way, Bonds took illegal and possibly harmful drugs to help him better play baseball better.
Barry Bonds is not alone. Barry's hardly the only player to do what he's done; Jose Canseco, Ken Caminiti, Rafael Palmeiro, and others come to mind. Has anybody ever talked about taking away their MVPs and Gold Gloves or asterisking their stats? Has anyone talked about a lifetime ban for Alex Sanchez or Juan Rincon? It goes farther back, however. Cheating in baseball goes back to the very beginnings. In the Hall of Fame alone, we have players who threw games (Ty Cobb and Tris Speaker), players who used illegal bats (Babe Ruth), players who used illegal pitches (Gaylord Perry), and players who took illegal drugs to help them play baseball better (Willie Mays and countless others). Barry Bonds is hardly the only cheater in the history of the game. Sure, he's had better methods of cheating, but it's important to get the proper perspective on all of this: Bonds and his contemporaries are simply the latest step in the evolution of cheating in baseball.
Barry Bonds is one of the greatest baseball players of all time. The idea that Bonds was not an all-time great by the time he reached 33 has been slowly spreading for the past few years. I've written at length about this before, but the gist of it is that Barry Bonds had established himself as one of the history's best players by 1998. Anybody coming to any other conclusion is letting their bias cloud their judgment.
What does it all mean? Barry Bonds is an all-time great player, a jerk, and a cheater - He's also far from the only player to ever fit this description. Do me a favor - if you're one of the people that show up to Giants games to heckle Barry, be an equal opportunity hater. You can heckle guys like Jason Giambi, Gary Sheffield, Juan Rincon, Jorge Piedra, Michael Morse, Rafael Betancourt, Ryan Franklin, and Matt Lawton. You can campaign for Jose Canseco's and Ken Caminit's MVP awards to be stricken from the record books. You can write letters to MLB and tell them to asterisk next to Rafael Palmeiro's 569 home runs.
You can also just realize that this problem is about neither steroids nor Barry, and focusing on one person does nothing to actually solve the bigger problem.
Date
Mon 05/22/06, 4:26 am EST
