Steroids Naivete Stings, By: Terry Frei
07-06-06
Behind the visiting dugout Wednesday at Coors Field, Colorado native Jason Malecha wore his Barry Bonds jersey proudly, shrugging off the scattered taunting he took when he greeted every Bonds at-bat with a standing ovation.
And why is Malecha, a golf pro at The Ranch Country Club in Westminster, still a fan of the Giants' left fielder?
"Because he's the greatest hitter of all time," Malecha said.
The steroids charges, he pointed out, stem from a period when major-league baseball had no rules against them and no testing for them. Besides, he added, "they haven't been proven. You can argue about it, but he's the only one to hit 73. All the other guys doing it should have hit 50. ... He was keeping up."
In a nutshell, that's the reasonable Bonds defense. There were a lot of fans in Giants jerseys, T-shirts and hats at Coors Field on Wednesday who would have nodded in agreement. As I walked away in the early innings of the Rockies' 5-3 victory over the Giants, I admitted to Malecha that I detest Bonds.
"Oh, I know," he said with a wave of understanding.
I detest Bonds in part because I agree with a lot of what Malecha and the other Bonds defenders say. We just disagree on where to go from there.
My view is that because Bonds appears to only have been part of a pack of corner-cutters, because he wanted to ascend and be immortal above them all, and because he still is playing, to many of us he has become the representative of something worth booing. And that's every night, not just on a night when he goes 1-for-4 as the Rockies remain in a first-place tie in the National League West.
Our disdain for Bonds has very little, if anything, to do with his boorishness, or even with our disgust over his ridiculous "victim" act. We're mad, all right, not only at him but MLB and the players union. Every night he takes the field as the No. 2 home run hitter of all time, Bonds reminds us of how don't-want-to-know blinkered we were over the past decade.
I bought into it all, too, and my sheepishness heightens my disgust.
Doesn't it seem laughable now? In looking back over the footage of Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa early in their careers, and then of their 1998 chase for the home run record, how could we not have figured it out? Jason Giambi, bulking up and looking like he might be in line for a screen test for the "Incredible Hulk" remake as he positions himself to get a huge contract from George Steinbrenner? Yes, even Rafael Palmeiro, whose subsequent congressional testimony matched Jimmy Hoffa's for indignance, and apparently was about as truthful?
They were only a few among many. How many, perhaps we'll never know. As long as Jose Canseco is wrong this time - he is arguing that the current testing program includes at least some immunity for stars - I care more about making sure the sport is cleaning up and striving for ways to toss human growth hormone from the game as well, than about all the details of the ugly period. And that includes both in San Francisco and in LoDo.
I know enough to know how compliant, gullible, or stupid, or all of the above, we were.
Of course, it isn't just baseball.
Absolutely, many NFL players for too long relied on steroids. Not that this excuses it, but whether it involved a linebacker or a lineman, they were supporting actors, not playing the skill positions or chasing records. The NFL found religion when it discovered juiced-up players were bad investments. So if baseball wants to argue that we haven't been as derisive about football's reliance on chemical enhancement (and nobody pretends it has been completely eradicated), and that Bill Romanowski, another figure in the BALCO investigation, still can sell books in Denver and have "fans" begging him to sign it, that's valid.
If a bunch of skinny clones riding bikes in France, or track and field athletes want to get in chemical and blood-doping duels, I don't care.
But I still want this game to be different - not the religious experience or strained literary metaphor some want to make it, but at least a great sport worthy of its historical echoes.
Bonds' quest has been about wanting to be cited as one of the great home run hitters of all time. Perhaps saddest of all, before he started searching for means to pump up his numbers even more, he deservedly was destined to go down as one of the game's greatest players.
So especially now that Bonds has passed Babe Ruth, he is the representation of what our attitude during that McGwire and Sosa era encouraged.
A disgraceful period we wish could be erased both from the Baseball Encyclopedia and our memories.
