Bonds spin is far gone, By: Doug Krikorian, Sports Columnist
The rhetoric has been overheated, spectacularly vindictive, as though the guy has committed a heinous crime worthy of incarceration at Pelican Bay State Prison.
Kick Barry Bonds out of baseball, urge sports talk radio listeners with their usual hysteria, as well as many in the sporting literati shorn of reasoned perspective.
No way Barry Bonds ever should be inducted into something as sacred as the Hall of Fame, even though it's brimming with alcoholics, bigots, spielers, misogynists, fixers, drug addicts and a lot of other types that would not serve as role model exemplars.
Do something, Bud Selig, anything, bound, gag and quarter Bonds, remand him to Baghdad, or even worse, force him to star in a Pauly Shore flick.
Oh, please!
I've heard of steroid rage, but now a condition has come upon the scene that is retroactive media steroid rage.
Suddenly, because Sports Illustrated recently printed excerpts from a forthcoming book called "Game of Shadows" that will detail Bonds' steroid usage that began after the 1998 season, it is now fashionable to pounce on Bonds, as though he were guilty of a crime against nature.
This is not a feeding frenzy.
It's worse.
This is an Inquisition.
I mean, what precisely did Barry Bonds do that is so reprehensible?
I mean, after watching two pumped up individuals named Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa wage their famous home run duel during that summer of '98, Bonds decided he, too, would pursue a regimen that would pump up his anatomy.
I mean, what's the big deal?
Steroids weren't banned from baseball at the time and it was common knowledge by anyone with even the faintest weightlifting awareness that a lot of guys were using them around the sport.
Shhh, keep this a secret, but I knew all along that McGwire and Sosa and many other major leaguers were cramming steroids into their systems because I've been around weightlifting all my life and have seen first hand the drugs' staggering impact.
Bonds only started doing what many of his contemporaries were doing including a very famous former Dodger star who, somehow, has remained detached from this raging controversy and he became even a more potent force than he was before when I always thought he was the game's top performer.
And, remember, Bonds had struck over 400 home runs and won three MVP titles before he decided on his radical course.
I have to brace myself against a wall from falling over from laughter when I hear those pious purists who want to throw the book at Bonds because, well, they say he, omigod, cheated, which, technically, he didn't because steroids weren't a banned substance when he was using them.
Wow, that sure makes Bonds novel in a game in which cheating has been a hallowed part since its invention.