So… Some belated congratulations are in order. Congrats to Tom Glavine for becoming the 23rd pitcher to win 300 games. Congrats to Alex Rodriguez for becoming the youngest player to hit 500 home runs. And congrats to Barry Bonds for tying Hank Aaron with 755 career home runs.
There. I said it.
See, as hard as it is to believe, I recently read something interesting at ESPN.com. Specifically, this exchange between Jim Capel, Rob Neyer, and Jayson Stark titled “Who’s The Greatest Slugger Ever?”
While in the end I’m on the side of Ruth, both because of the points Neyer makes in the thread, and the little fact that Ruth still has the highest career adjusted OPS+ of all time, and while everything I’ve read tells me Barry Bonds most certainly isn’t the type of person I’d want to have a beer with, I think the defense of Bonds in the thread has a lot of merit to it.
First, with or without steroids, Bonds has been a supremely talented baseball player. Stark quotes a Giants fan friend as saying “that even if you believe he cheated, he was the best player in baseball before he cheated and the best player in baseball after he cheated.” Let’s also keep in mind that lots of people were “cheating” (like it or not, under the rules of baseball at the time, what the steroid users were doing wasn’t actually cheating), but they all didn’t put up one ridiculous season after another like Bonds did.
Yes, surely Bonds’ numbers were elevated by steroids, but at the same time they were also likely depressed by steroid-enhanced pitchers. We of course can’t know for sure what net effect steroids had on the league, but the best analysis I’m aware of, from a chapter in the Baseball Prospectus team’s “Baseball Between The Numbers”, says that the answer is very likely “not much”. But what differences are “fair” between the eras anyway? Are steroids less fair than amphetamines, which had been used in baseball since WWII? Are they less fair than players not having to compete against the best minority players pre-Jackie Robinson? Are they less fair than the improved medical procedures and training regimens that modern-day players have available? As Capel writes, “If people can accept numbers from an era in which blacks and Hispanics were banned from the game, if they can accept numbers from an era when amphetamines were rampant, then why can’t they just accept the new numbers?”
While we wish and hope for some platonic ideal of baseball “fairness” from which to judge from, it doesn’t exist. Even if to you steroids is the cardinal sin of baseball, you still can’t escape the fact than in an era where players were popping them like candy, Bonds still put up crazy numbers even compared to the rest of them.
None of this is to portray Bonds as some sort of martyr. He’s got his millions, he’s going to be just fine, believe me. He’s going to have the record whether people like it or not. And while you’re of course still free to not like him as a person (heck, I sure don’t), don’t tell me the record is somehow less “legitimate” than any other baseball record, and don’t tell me that he doesn’t deserve a spot in the Hall of Fame.