Baseball's bondage
March 12, 2006
Boston Globe Editorial
IF BARRY BONDS did take the performance-enhancing substances a voluminously documented new book claims he took, he was not only cheating on the competition. He was entering into a Faustian pact with modern medicine, attempting to purchase a place in the baseball pantheon at the risk of his honor -- and his health.
Ideally, Bonds would come clean about his chemical quest to supplant Babe Ruth and Hank Aaron as well as his contemporaries Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa. At the least, an honest public reckoning -- if accompanied by some expression of regret or remorse -- might change the way Bonds is perceived by today's fans, and maybe even by posterity.
If Bonds were to help unravel the convenient lies surrounding the doping of ballplayers, he could redeem, at least partly, his place in baseball history. But he would have to recognize how he had transgressed against the game, his own gifts, and the young people who thought all those home runs were hit by a talented man, not a hormonally altered creature of laboratory science.
The lies that need to be undone are many. The most obvious is the pretense of Major League Baseball that nothing was amiss. The San Francisco Giants and the players' association also had a leading role in that willful ignoring of reality and, possibly, illegality. The association was protecting its members from intrusive drug testing. The owners and commissioner Bud Selig were protecting a business that flourished during the 1998 season, when McGwire and Sosa surpassed the single-season home run records of Ruth and Roger Maris with suspicious ease. After that season, Bonds apparently became determined to ingest whatever steroids, hormones, or female fertility drugs it would take to outdo McGwire's 70-home run season.
Bonds, then, was not alone in making a travesty of the national pastime. The league did not want to know what was going on because it was marketing the achievements that came out of a syringe or a pill. In an era when celebrities of all kinds were having themselves altered surgically or chemically, the doping of one slugger could be passed off as merely a crystalization of the zeitgeist.
But by averting their gaze for so long, Selig and the players' association were disfiguring the game they are supposed to preserve. Whatever Bonds may now do, Major League Baseball has an obligation to appoint an investigator above reproach who can uncover the truth not only about Bonds, but about all the players who sold their souls to pump up their muscles and hit home runs.
And it hardly matters if no official asterisk is placed in the record books wherever Bonds's name appears. Posterity will rightly remember all the astounding statistics of the steroid era as Mephistopheles's mockery of human hubris.
As the Police reminded us ... Mephistophele's is not your name, but I know what you're up to just the same ...
Bonds may not BE the devil, but he has surely sold his soul
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