Okay, so I Care A Little

The whole Bonds thing has been plaguing me. I really don't want to care because, you know, sports are awful, corrupting, and I really am trying to cut back on getting wrapped up in them. It's not like I have a burning mad-on for Barry or anything. Who's name goes in the record book doesn't have a whole lot of impact on me, personally. But although I verge on the apathetic here, avoiding the coverage and the articles with firm resolution – flicking the channel away the second a broadcast breaks in with a Bonds at bat, for instance – I still don't like it. Because, when the final accounting is held, Bonds cheated. And he shouldn't prosper, shouldn't be lauded, because he broke the rules and, so far, has gotten away with it.

Which I suppose is a naive view. People cheat all the time. Rules get bent, broken, and tell the doctors they just bumped into a door knob all the time. And people who do wrong get away with it. Most of the time. I know that. But what I believe is that's not right. So, when someone is caught cheating they need to be punished. Not just for what they've done but to discourage everyone else who'll never be caught. The message should be, “Try and get away with whatever you want. You might even, for a while. But if we catch you, you're going to pay.”

And I suppose that in the grand scheme of things, putting a foreign compound into your body is pretty far down the list of wrongs to commit. But steroid use, illegal performance enhancing, has to be made to be one of the cardinal sins in baseball (And other sports). Not because it's so horrible but because it compromises the integrity of the game.

Bonds is a cheater the way Pete Rose is a cheater. Rose bet on baseball. It's a known, proven fact. What's unknown is whether he bet on his own games. If he did then it's possible he was working to influence the outcome of those games, to twist the results by not batting as well or managing as smartly as he could have. Or even just pressing harder than he would have otherwise to ensure his team covered his bet. Either way, his crime affected the results of the contest. And that's a capitol crime when it comes to a game. We'll never know if he did or what he did, but the cloud of suspicion is always going to hang over those games – we'll never be sure if those results were legitimately achieved or not.

And if Bonds was juicing - which I think it's pretty self-evident he was by this point – then it's no different. Doesn't matter how much the statistics have been skewed, the box scores have been thrown off. The contest turned from one of unequal skill on an equal field to one of who's willing to devote, to sacrifice the most before the game even starts. And we'll never know just how much or how little the game was affected, just that it was.

Bonds is just the tip of the iceberg, the lightning rod. He wasn't the only one to juice, just the most prominent with the most evidence behind him suggesting he did. I remember back when MacGuire was breaking the record, some reporter found a bottle of a steroid precursor or some kind of, then perfectly legal, performance enhancer just sitting in his locker. It was a one day story. No one particularly cared. No one followed up, drove the narrative home, the way they did with Bonds. Because MacGuire was a nice guy. Because baseball had sold its soul to the long ball in order to bring fans back from the disastrous lock-out only a few years before. Because the reporters thought that no one cared. Because MacGuire was white. I don't know the reason. But whatever it was, these stormclouds have been gathering for a long time. Because it's not just Barry and the whole game of baseball has lost its credibility.

One thing that's interesting, though, is how views on Bonds tend to break down along racial lines. Among the black populace, he's incredibly popular and the view is, I believe, that he's being persecuted because of his race. It's the same thing that motivates the people in Atlanta who are supporting Michael Vick, I guess. Innocent until proven guilty and all that, but it's hard to see how someone could hear the allegations made towards Vick and be anything but appalled. But, then, I'm not black and I wasn't raised in a culture of hatred and repression (No, I was raised in Detroit. Which means a culture of segregation. You stay on your side of the city, the darkies stay on theirs, and you agree not to bring certain things up in polite conversation. I'm not sure which form of racism is worse.) and so my first impluse isn't to wonder if someone's mistreated.

Just poison, on so many levels. And I don't like it. And I don't want to care about it. But I do.