Bonds's Best Game Is Playing Victim

Yesterday, I woke up and the world was still spinning on its axis. I went to the farmer's market in my neighborhood park and bought bags full of ripe peaches and some gorgeous cantaloupes. I took a bicycle ride, and spent the early afternoon reading a novel. It was a perfect Sunday. Barry Bonds had, somehow, managed not to ruin my life by hitting his 755th home run the day before.

Lately, as Bonds has neared the dreaded number 756, I've applied a simple rule to all criticism of the Giants' slugger. If the critic mentions — while claiming that Bonds has ruined baseball and/or their Sunday — the 2002 Atlanta Braves, I take him seriously. If not, I don't. I haven't had to take many critics seriously of late, and I doubt I'll be forced to any time soon.

The significance of the 2002 Atlanta Braves, if you're wondering, is that they played Bonds's San Francisco Giants in the National League playoffs and lost, three games to two. In the decisive game at Turner Field in Atlanta, Bonds scored on a Reggie Sanders single in the second inning, and hit a home run off Kevin Millwood in the fourth inning; those runs provided the margin of victory in a 3–1 win for the Giants. As Bonds was almost certainly fueled by drugs during this game, one could reasonably advance an argument that Bonds cheated the Braves out of a fair shot at winning a pennant by experimenting in the nether regions of biology, and thus that he harmed the sport's integrity

No one makes this argument because no one who really thinks that Bonds has harmed the integrity of baseball has thought the matter through. Sixty years of segregation harmed the game's integrity. So did Ty Cobb, Tris Speaker, and Pete Rose giving their money to bookies. Owners colluding against free agents in the 1980s deliberately sacrificed their chances of winning for money — that harmed the integrity of the sport. So has baseball's refusal to field a team in Brooklyn, which endows the Yankees and Mets with unfair advantages over other teams. Bonds is just a cheater, and maybe not even that, since he's never failed a steroid test and using steroids wasn't against the sport's rules during most of the time we can safely assume he was using them. The Braves weren't rooked, they were just playing a game with a bad drug policy — one that's since been fixed.

Bonds hurt no one but himself. One of the tragic aspects of 755 is that it seems he didn't start using estrogen pills and the like until after the 1998 season. At the end of that campaign, he was 34 years old and on pace to break the career records for runs and walks, with a substantial chance of breaking Hank Aaron's record for home runs. A three-time MVP, an eight-time Gold Glove winner, and the only ballplayer to be depicted by Wesley Snipes in a bad movie, Bonds was already a first-ballot Hall of Famer at that point. A normal denouement to his career would have seen him classed, at worst, with legends like Frank Robinson.

There is reason to think Bonds started using massive amounts of steroids after the 1998 season simply because he didn't feel his greatness had been acknowledged. Mark McGwire, a grotesque player who wasn't fit to swing Bonds's bats, whose bludgeoning home run attack reduced the game to its crudest level, was acclaimed as a hero; Bonds was painted as a villain. The theory goes that Bonds decided that if everyone else was using drugs and still not attaining his level, there was no reason for him not to show what the best player in the game could do on a level playing field.

Think this through and you see that Bonds robbed himself of the chance to be loved as no ballplayer ever has been. Imagine what could have been! A Bonds who broke the record while clean beyond reproach — and it's worth emphasizing that this very well could have happened — would not only have been thought by the same people who now hate him to have redeemed a scandal-ridden game, but would have been personally vindicated beyond imagination. All his eccentricities would have been forgiven, and the sheer magnitude of what he's accomplished in the game would have been celebrated by all. Everyone with the least awareness of baseball would have known that Barry Bonds was the greatest baseball player ever to live.

It's a shame that this didn't happen, but I'm not hurt by it, and neither is baseball. Bonds, who will never inspire much more than ambivalence in anyone again, is the only real victim. And who's to say, when the victim and the accused are the same man, that there's been anything like a crime at all?