It’s good to see Barry Bonds convicted of something. And it actually is more than a little bit of something. The jury today said Bonds is guilty of obstruction. That’s a federal felony, and he could do jail time, though he probably will not.
I never really cared if Bonds did jail time. I didn’t care if he lost his money. (Though that crew of lawyers; wow. There went a few months of some of those big baseball contracts.)
What I cared about?
That we get some sense of guilt, affirmed by a jury of 12 of his peers, that Bonds did not tell the truth to federal investigators looking into his drug use.
It has been noted time and again that this trial was not about Bonds denying that he was injected with performance enhancing drugs. It was about whether he lied about knowingly taking performance-enhancing drugs. Not just taking them. Knowingly taking them.
Those are my modest goals for the Steroid Age. That the most egregious offenders either 1) admit they did it or 2) be found by a court to be on the wrong side of the law.
And if the Bonds trial didn’t come in with a guilty verdict on Mr. Homer using drugs, we had scads of testimony that makes it clear Barry Bonds was juiced. For years. Right through when he broke Henry Aaron’s homer record.
(And I will not even look up how many homers Bonds hit; I do not care. They were bogus. I will, however, never forget the 755 that Aaron hit. That is your record, right there. And for one season? I am sticking with Roger Maris and his 61. The guys who hit more than that, Bonds, McGwire, Sosa, I don’t count them. They are not in the discussion because all three are tainted.)
What we seem to be discovering, through the testimony of ordinary players, or even lesser players, is that lots and lots of guys were cheating, and some of them were marginal players like Marvin Benard. They didn’t break records, but they appear to have kept some non-druggies out of the game. They abused the game, too, but they didn’t trash its record book.)
Those of us who were often in clubhouses during the height of the Steroid Era … maybe 1995 through 2005 … know how many guys we saw who were just completely “ripped” … whose uniforms strained from the effort of holding in all that muscle (and water). The guys who had that truly distinct, almost shiny look of skin stretched over artificially inflated muscle. (One of them was Randy Velarde, who played for the Angels in 1997-1998, who was so huge and stiff that he basically couldn’t play his position, second base, anymore.) Some of us grew a little bit insensitive to it, because so many guys looked that way. But if we thought about it, we knew.
How many times did we write stories, or read stories, about how this or that guy had “really hit the weights” in the offseason and had come back with “20 pounds of muscle.”
That was all code for “starting ‘roiding up,” and we knew it even then. We didn’t want to think about it, but in a dark recess of our minds, we knew it.
It was so common, our capacity for outrage was compromised. And, too, we wondered “how can it be proved?”
Now, I just want the elite players who dove into steroids and HGH to admit to their use … or be caught in tests … or to be forced to admit to their culpability in court, whether elliptically, like Barry Bonds, or while testifying, like Jason Giambi.
Next up: Roger Clemens. This may be a more straightforward case because, far as I know, key witnesses (like Greg Anderson, in the Bonds trial) are not willing to go to jail rather than testify.
We need to get to the bottom of this, even if it hurts.
1 response so far ↓
1 Gil Hulse // Apr 14, 2011 at 10:42 AM
I with you…Aaron and Maris. Should make a T-shirt.
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