Bonds, scandal have turned steroids into baseball's slimy little secret

In five years, sport has gone from McGwire's home run renaissance to scandal, shame and asterisks.

April 21, 2006

When Mark McGwire launched his 62nd home run of the 1998 season on a glorious September evening in St. Louis to rewrite one of the most cherished records in all of sports, Commissioner Bud Selig turned to Cardinals icon Stan Musial in their box seats at Busch Stadium and said, "This is the beginning of a renaissance."

It was.

Cue the violins.

That same year, Barry Bonds latched onto muscle-bound gym rat Greg Anderson and soon hired him as his personal trainer. Within two years, Anderson would connect with Victor Conte, the owner of a Bay Area laboratory.

And some seven years after McGwire's record-smashing season to save the sport, Conte was sentenced to four months in jail after pleading guilty to a steroid conspiracy charge that has implicated the game's greatest player.

This time, Selig turned his eyes.

Fortunately, others did not.

Thanks to a federal grand jury in San Francisco, Ken Caminiti's near-deathbed revelations, heat from a Congressional inquiry and one of the most explosive sports books ever, this could mark the beginning of what many hope is a reclamation.

Hopefully, baseball fans will eventually reclaim their sport and reconnect to a time when a home run was the product of nothing more than hard work and a keen batting eye, and when a record was something to be treasured, not something in need of a punctuation mark.

Asks Howard Bryant, a Washington Post sports reporter and author of a book on the infestation of drugs in major league baseball, "Is it possible to have a renaissance and a scandal at the same time?"

Apparently.

But the collision at home plate, Pete Rose-Ray Fosse style, may still be coming. Reality can do that.

Baseball's attendance numbers are up although that's due in part to the wild influx of new stadiums with spiked fan support early on. So is the game's rising popularity, but some of that may be traced to the full-blown cottage industry of fantasy baseball leagues and video games.

With the sport's biggest slugger under investigation for possible perjury before a federal grand jury, baseball remains mired in one of its most impure scandals that has impugned the integrity of the game and those who play and run it. Even Major League Baseball has pulled its head from the sand and belatedly chosen to investigate the biggest morass since the Black Sox scandal of 1919.

Left unchecked for far too long, the steroid era has done incalculable damage to the sport.

Those involved in the problem include a do-nothing commissioner who looked the other way; greedy, bottom-line owners; a players association more interested in salary than safety and in hits instead of health; a neglectful media uninterested in unearthing the fallacy of so many shattered records; a doting public that worshipped at the feet of Bonds, McGwire and Sammy Sosa; and chicks who dug the long ball.

Everyone else, of course, is clean.

Baseball should have started by testing minor leaguers far earlier. Bonds, who hasn't been tested any more than any other player even though his trainer pleaded guilty to steroid conspiracy, should be tested every day. More stringent, Olympic-style drug-testing is needed. Research on a urine test for human growth hormone is being done.

Any backlash in the bleachers has been incremental.

Lance Williams, one of the San Francisco Chronicle co-authors of the exhaustively researched book about Bonds and steroids called "Game of Shadows," said fans process such complex dirty laundry in a far different way than they viscerally appreciate a Bonds home run.

"You're building discomfort among the fans," Williams said Thursday at an enlightening UT journalism symposium concerning athletes and performance-enhancing drugs. "They don't like it, and they're going to turn away. They've done terrible damage."

Echoed co-author Mark Fainaru-Wada, "I think baseball thinks it has weathered the storm. There's this notion that they've eradicated the problem. But they're far from done dealing with this."

Especially since the focus of all this mistrust flirts with eclipsing Babe Ruth and eventually Hank Aaron for the most home runs in history. So how does the nation properly celebrate those moments? Williams predicts "a grotesque scene."

The game has undoubtedly suffered. And continues to do so as it stumbles along under the dark clouds of suspicion.

"There will absolutely be cheating as long as they play the game," said T.J. Quinn, New York Daily News investigative reporter. "Yes, baseball knew there was cheating. And, yes, they turned a blind eye. There was a willful ignorance. If it wasn't an economic matter, it wasn't important."

The Giants have fallen into that same financial trap. Bonds' gate attraction helped build their privately financed ballpark. In turn, the team allowed Bonds' personal trainer, stretching coach and strength coach total access to the team clubhouse in the face of baseball's edict against such personnel.

"The honest answer is," Williams said, "Barry Bonds is bigger than the Giants, and they've got to do whatever he wants."

In the meantime, baseball tries to clean its own house and rid itself of all that has disgraced the game. While baseball's investigation clearly focuses on Bonds, it would be totally remiss if it did not include every other slugger as well as all the pitchers who use the drugs to hasten recovery time.

That remains baseball's slimy little secret.

"If they do it right," Williams said, "steroids will be an interruption sort of like the early '30s when the ball was juiced. I can't imagine they will do anything with the records because they never have."

Barring the use of a barrelful of asterisks, baseball may just sigh and compartmentalize this decade-long era of misguided excess and treat it like the doddering aunt in the room. Don't mind her, she's not really there.

This is how baseball will try to reconnect to the game of Clemente and Mays and Musial. This is how America can spiritually restore the records of Maris and Ruth and Aaron. The real records.

Hopefully, second basemen won't be swinging for the fences quite so often. Those blockbuster home run seasons will be reserved for legitimate power hitters. And maybe, just maybe, chicks will dig natural baseball, and we'll enjoy a real renaissance.