In defense of Barry Bonds:
So now we come to it. Bonds sits at 748 home runs, and the collective white American baseball fanbase is his enemy. Every time he brings himself to bat, he is greeted by a shower of boos and copius amounts of berations such as "You cheat!" or "BALCO!" or "JUICED!" (ironically, all coming from the same drunk asshole sitting behind me). Whenever he strikes out, a hail of cheers emanates from the stands as if the home team has just won the game. He is the devil in kleats, the mortal enemy of seemingly every baseball fan in America.
But why?
Sure, the obvious response would be, "He did steroids!" but how reliable are those claims? There has never been, nor probably will there be as long as his career, proof of the claims that Bonds has done steroids. Sure, two San Francisco Chronicle reporters with hard-ons for fame and love of cash can claim the man has taken them, but can they prove it? The answer, for the time being, is no. They cannot. A Federal Grand Jury twice investigated Bonds for some kind of lawbreaking - why the federal government is involved in this is beyond me to comprehend - and found nothing, zero, zip. No evidence aside from the word of two ex-reporters that right now lack careers, let alone credibility.
There are plenty of arguments that seem to point in the direction that Bonds took steroids. For one, people point out that he is twice as big now as when he started out as a pro more than twenty years ago. As if that means fucking anything. Not a single person on the planet weighs the same at 45 that they did at 21, unless they've fucking starved themselves or have malaria. Not a one. Additionally, when Bonds started playing ball in the late eighties, not one major league baseball team had a strength trainer on its staff. Now, every team has one, and we've gotten to the point where the Yankees even fired theirs, blaming him for their early-season losing streak. Strength training and weightlifting dominates the sport today, whereas in the eighties, it did not EXIST. Take Roger Clemens as an example, one of the few players to have lasted about as long as Bonds has in the majors. When he was a rookie, was he the same size he is today? Absolutely not. Does that mean he took steroids? Of course not. To claim Clemens is juiced would be heresy at the very least in the baseball world. Size means nothing in the equation.
Well what about all the home runs Bonds has been hitting? Surely the sheer number of them factors into an argument that he took 'roids. Mark McGuire became a rare albino gorilla in 1999, after all, when he hit 70 home runs, and Sammy Sosa right behind him (Well, I guess we know Sosa didn't take steroids - he only corked his bat). But McGuire made absolutely no qualms about his steroid use. He didn't even bother to keep it a fucking secret - nobody in baseball did, which is what makes this retrospective action so insane. Bonds keeps his personal life far too secret and private for the media to even ]i]make up any physical evidence that he's taken steroids. Then there's Manny Ramirez of the Boston Red Sox, who last week reached 479 home runs more than a year before Bonds did. If he continues to play as long as Bonds has, he'll certainly at the least break Ruth's mark of 715. Does that mean he took steroids too? Of course not. And then there's just the physical anomaly that is Alex Rodriguez, who is the heir apparent to the record in general. Imagine how white America will take that - two blacks and two hispanics atop their beloved home run list. The horror!
The fact is, there is absolutely no solid evidence that Barry Bonds has taken steroids in his career. The majority of the baseball world seems to have lynched him without a shred of evidence that he's done what they've accused him of. Imagine if our legal system worked this way - thank god it doesn't. The only reason Bonds is treated the way he is, is so that sportswriters and fans can retroactively clear their slates. They allowed the mayhem in the 1990s to continue unabated, and had their noses so far up Mark McGuire's ass they could smell his saliva. Now they're pretending that incident never happened, and voraciously attacking Bonds as if they were making up for the lost time in the 1999 season when more than 50% of baseball players took steroids and nobody gave even the greenest, most watery shit. Bonds has become the scapegoat, a way for major league baseball to pass the blame that falls squarely on its own shoulders to an individual who does not deserve it and has done everything possible in his career to avoid it. Baseball allowed it to happen. It's time for them to reap their rewards - if Bonds did steroids in the first place.
So now we come to it. Bonds sits at 748 home runs, and the collective white American baseball fanbase is his enemy. Every time he brings himself to bat, he is greeted by a shower of boos and copius amounts of berations such as "You cheat!" or "BALCO!" or "JUICED!" (ironically, all coming from the same drunk asshole sitting behind me). Whenever he strikes out, a hail of cheers emanates from the stands as if the home team has just won the game. He is the devil in kleats, the mortal enemy of seemingly every baseball fan in America.
But why?
Sure, the obvious response would be, "He did steroids!" but how reliable are those claims? There has never been, nor probably will there be as long as his career, proof of the claims that Bonds has done steroids. Sure, two San Francisco Chronicle reporters with hard-ons for fame and love of cash can claim the man has taken them, but can they prove it? The answer, for the time being, is no. They cannot. A Federal Grand Jury twice investigated Bonds for some kind of lawbreaking - why the federal government is involved in this is beyond me to comprehend - and found nothing, zero, zip. No evidence aside from the word of two ex-reporters that right now lack careers, let alone credibility.
There are plenty of arguments that seem to point in the direction that Bonds took steroids. For one, people point out that he is twice as big now as when he started out as a pro more than twenty years ago. As if that means fucking anything. Not a single person on the planet weighs the same at 45 that they did at 21, unless they've fucking starved themselves or have malaria. Not a one. Additionally, when Bonds started playing ball in the late eighties, not one major league baseball team had a strength trainer on its staff. Now, every team has one, and we've gotten to the point where the Yankees even fired theirs, blaming him for their early-season losing streak. Strength training and weightlifting dominates the sport today, whereas in the eighties, it did not EXIST. Take Roger Clemens as an example, one of the few players to have lasted about as long as Bonds has in the majors. When he was a rookie, was he the same size he is today? Absolutely not. Does that mean he took steroids? Of course not. To claim Clemens is juiced would be heresy at the very least in the baseball world. Size means nothing in the equation.
Well what about all the home runs Bonds has been hitting? Surely the sheer number of them factors into an argument that he took 'roids. Mark McGuire became a rare albino gorilla in 1999, after all, when he hit 70 home runs, and Sammy Sosa right behind him (Well, I guess we know Sosa didn't take steroids - he only corked his bat). But McGuire made absolutely no qualms about his steroid use. He didn't even bother to keep it a fucking secret - nobody in baseball did, which is what makes this retrospective action so insane. Bonds keeps his personal life far too secret and private for the media to even ]i]make up any physical evidence that he's taken steroids. Then there's Manny Ramirez of the Boston Red Sox, who last week reached 479 home runs more than a year before Bonds did. If he continues to play as long as Bonds has, he'll certainly at the least break Ruth's mark of 715. Does that mean he took steroids too? Of course not. And then there's just the physical anomaly that is Alex Rodriguez, who is the heir apparent to the record in general. Imagine how white America will take that - two blacks and two hispanics atop their beloved home run list. The horror!
The fact is, there is absolutely no solid evidence that Barry Bonds has taken steroids in his career. The majority of the baseball world seems to have lynched him without a shred of evidence that he's done what they've accused him of. Imagine if our legal system worked this way - thank god it doesn't. The only reason Bonds is treated the way he is, is so that sportswriters and fans can retroactively clear their slates. They allowed the mayhem in the 1990s to continue unabated, and had their noses so far up Mark McGuire's ass they could smell his saliva. Now they're pretending that incident never happened, and voraciously attacking Bonds as if they were making up for the lost time in the 1999 season when more than 50% of baseball players took steroids and nobody gave even the greenest, most watery shit. Bonds has become the scapegoat, a way for major league baseball to pass the blame that falls squarely on its own shoulders to an individual who does not deserve it and has done everything possible in his career to avoid it. Baseball allowed it to happen. It's time for them to reap their rewards - if Bonds did steroids in the first place.