BY JOSH ABEL

In print | September 18, 2008

As the 2008 baseball playoff races spiral to their conclusions, one of the best hitters on the planet sits at home.

He wanted to play. His agent said he wasn’t interested in money.

He’d accept the league minimum salary and donate it to underprivileged children to buy tickets to the team’s games. Yet no one signed Barry Bonds. Bonds is a lot of bad things. He is a jerk and narcissist. He’s a bad fielder and he’s a media circus waiting to happen. But, man, can he hit.
In 2007, at age 42, amid talk of his horribly declining skills, he led Major League Baseball in on-base percentage and was 12th in slugging percentage (among players with at least 400 plate appearances). He brings a lot of baggage with him, but there are a lot of teams on the outside of the playoff picture looking in who had nothing to lose by signing him, and a lot of teams on the inside looking at the playoffs who could still use him. As everything swirled around him, he would have created runs for any team.

But Bonds has been branded. MLB and its pawns, the sportswriters, have successfully pinned the Steroid Era on him. Last year, on August 7, he hit the 756th home run of his career, setting the all-time record. The game was on national television, and the national audience got to see Bonds round the bases. The previously hostile fans in San Diego gave him a standing ovation. All but one.
ESPN showed MLB Commissioner Bud Selig as Bonds made his victory lap. Selig sat in his seat frowning. Only when someone repeatedly urged him did he stand up awkwardly, still refusing to clap. The message was clear: Bonds and his steroid-fueled assault on the record books are a disease to the game. He is the villain of the Steroid Era.

But this story just doesn’t hold. No account has him using steroids before 2000. What was he doing before then? He was being an ass, yes, but he was also being one of the best players in the game, and doing it clean. What was Bud Selig doing? He was counting the money the sport was raking in because of the homer boom. More to the point, he was ignoring the steroid problem.

Bonds watched steroids become a bigger and bigger part of the game, and he saw the users get praised. In 1999, he hurt his knee, and began using to recover. The rest is well known: he kept using and became the best hitter since Babe Ruth.

Clearly, Bonds was not the problem. Selig and the rest of the team owners were the only people who could have done anything to stop the proliferation of steroids. Instead, they counted their revenue.
The owners of the game have at least partially sidestepped the brunt of the blame, and they did so by pinning it on Bonds. He was an easy target because he’s been such a jerk for so long. No one had any qualms about booing him and harassing him with insulting signs. Forget that steroid use was rife in the game and that the people truly capitalizing were the owners. People were happy to boo Bonds and move on from the ugliness, and so the anti-Bonds angle was gobbled up.

He broke the record, his contract ran out, and now the owners have decided that he can’t be let back into the game. Of course, that’s off the record, because it’s extremely illegal, but there’s clearly an agreement that the game does not need any more Barry Bonds.

You’ll hear arguments from talking heads on ESPN and in sports page columns that no team wants the home run king because of his selfish attitude and the media swarm he would create. This just can’t be true. Too many teams had too much to gain and too little to lose by signing him for this to be the case.

Bonds is not playing due to some sort of collusive agreement among the teams, and when we accept the party line, that Bonds is unemployed because no team could afford the baggage of signing the poster boy of a tainted era, we are in fact letting the true culprits of that era off the hook.
MLB owners have colluded before. But what’s at stake this time is not money, it’s blame for one of the game’s dark moments. With Bonds out of sight, they hope to keep steroids out of people’s minds. So, Barry sits at home, while teams look for offense elsewhere.

« RETURN TO SPORTS

« PREV ARTICLE | NEXT ARTICLE »