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| Tuesday, April 11, 2006 |
Chuck Klosterman has a thoughtful piece in ESPN The Magazine about what Barry Bonds’ passing of Babe Ruth’s legendary 714 home run milestone will mean. (As an aside, I find it interesting that people continue to fixate on Ruth, even though most of his records, including this one, have long since been broken).
 The reason we keep statistics — and the reason we care about statistical milestones — is that we assume some sort of emotional experience will accompany their creation and obliteration. These moments are supposed to embody ideas that transcend the notion of grown men playing children’s games; these moments are supposed to be a positive amalgamation of awe, evolution, inspiration, admiration and the macrobiotic potential of man. But the recent success of Bonds contains only two of those qualities, and maybe only the first.
[...]
At this point in history, no one considers baseball as popular as football or as culturally relevant as basketball. But baseball is still the intellectual game; it’s the game most compelling to the likes of Ken Burns and George Will and Yo La Tengo, and that’s at least partially due to the quantitative import of its record keeping. Baseball is the only sport where numbers always seem meaningful, and it’s the only sport where a numeric comparison between players of different eras is even halfway reasonable. Kareem Abdul-Jabbar scored almost 7,000 more career points than Wilt Chamberlain did, but no one would ever suggest that Abdul-Jabbar was the superior, or even comparable, offensive force. Baseball is the only game where categories like batting average and slugging percentage have objective meaning, and it’s the one sport where specific cumulative plateaus (3,000 hits, 300 wins) are regularly used as guidelines for the Hall of Fame. It’s the only game where sabermetrics could exist and be taken seriously. Unlike football and basketball, baseball exists within a hard reality.
[...]
Steroids, and Bonds in particular, have probably changed that forever. Performance-enhancing drugs create two problems for baseball’s bean counters — one of which is predictable and one of which is not. The first, obviously, is that they enhance performance. The second is that these performances are enhanced to a degree that’s completely unclear. In the case of Bonds, it would appear that the improvement has been profound: At an age (37) when his skills should have been diminishing, he hit 24 more home runs than he ever had before. But that still tells us very little about the specific impact of steroid use.
There is no way to quantify the intangible components of injecting yourself with drugs that make you better. How much of this increased production was due to Bonds’ newfound sense of mental invincibility? How much was due to the realization by opposing pitchers that Bonds was: (a) totally juiced up and therefore (b) impossible to overpower? Moreover, it’s not like steroids magically turn spray hitters into Magnus Ver Magnusson; they mostly help hitters (and pitchers) recover faster from workouts, which allows them to train harder and more often. Does this mean “the cream” and “the clear” made Bonds into a freakish superman, or does it mean they merely allowed him to become the natural superfreak he always had the potential to be? These are questions we can never answer.
Certainly true. But that won’t keep us from talking and writing about it.
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| Wednesday, March 29, 2006 |
Major League Baseball is launching an investigation into whether Barry Bonds and others used steroids, reports AP baseball writer Ronald Blum.
Major League Baseball will investigate alleged steroid use by Barry Bonds and other players, and plans to hire U.S. Senate majority leader George Mitchell to lead the effort. A baseball official told The Associated Press on Wednesday that final plans were to be announced Thursday. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because commissioner Bud Selig has not yet made his intentions public.
Selig’s decision to launch the probe, first reported Wednesday by ESPN, comes in the wake of “Game of Shadows,” a book by two San Francisco Chronicle reporters detailing alleged extensive steroid use by Bonds and other baseball stars. The commissioner has said for several weeks that he was evaluating how to respond to the book.
Some in Congress have called for an independent investigation. Mitchell, a Maine Democrat and a director of the Boston Red Sox, has been a director of the Florida Marlins and served on an economic study committee that Selig appointed in 1999. Mitchell’s possible involvement was first mentioned Wednesday in The New York Times. The name of a lawyer who will run the mechanics of the probe also was to be announced.
No matter what the findings of an investigation, it would be difficult for baseball to penalize anyone for steroids used prior to Sept. 30, 2002, when a joint drug agreement between management and the players’ association took effect. Baseball began drug testing in 2003 and started testing with penalties the following year.
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| Tuesday, March 21, 2006 |
Michael Mandel asks a provocative question apropos the continuing controversy about Barry Bonds being on the Juice,
[W]ould we be quite so horrified, I wonder, if we were talking about “smart pills” or memory pills instead of steroids? Suppose that a pharmaceutical company was selling a pill that would improve your memory by 30% or your IQ by 30%, with the same sort of side effects as steroids. Would you be willing to take them for 3 or 5 critical years in your career? What if you knew that everyone else was taking them? What if you knew that the Chinese or the French were taking them? And would you be willing to give your kids these pills in, say, the junior year of high school, to increase the odds of getting a good score on the SAT?
A fair question. If, indeed, they came “with the same sort of side effects as steroids” I would not. Would I have in my teens and early 20s under that sort of pressure? Maybe.
Hat tip: Virginia Postrel
crosspost from OTB
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| Friday, March 17, 2006 |
USA Today columnist Sandy Grady argues that the “Barry vs. Babe” argument is “No contest.”
Some evening in late spring or early summer, Major League Baseball will come face to face with its ultimate nightmare, the shame of its lies and evasions on gaudy full-screen display. That’s the moment a gimpy, sulky, bulky 41-year-old named Barry Bonds struts around the bases after hitting his seventh home run of 2006 and the 715th of his career. He will have passed the game’s iconic Babe Ruth for No. 2 in lifetime homers.
Ignite the fireworks! Roll the videotape! Let the bugles blare! But while the rockets explode, I suggest the scoreboard light up with the following message: “Mr. Bonds and baseball’s executives would like to thank the makers of Winstrol … Deca-Durabolin … human growth hormone … trenbolone … insulin … testosterone decanoate, Clomid and Modafinil for this historic moment. Thank you, chemists of the world!”
And before Bonds disappears into the dugout, I would hope several people would share in the adulation for Bonds. They would include MLB Commissioner Bud Selig, leaders of the baseball players union, executives of the San Francisco Giants, Bonds’ former manager Dusty Baker, owners of all other big-league teams present, the drug experts of Bay Area Laboratory Co-Operative, and assorted TV and print journalists. They were co-conspirators in Bonds’ inglorious achievement. By turning away with sly winks, they were enablers who created the Great Home-Run Drug Fraud.
The problem with this is that we will never know how many of Bonds’ homers are a direct result of these substances. After all, he was hitting them at a prodigious pace before he is alleged to have started the Juice.
In between steroids rants, though, Grady makes a more cogent argument:
Even if he hit 1,000 homers, the chance of Bonds eclipsing Babe Ruth as the most famous player in history would be as slim as – well, Bill Clinton or George W. Bush knocking Abraham Lincoln off his presidential shrine.
Look, it’s futile entertainment to compare athletes of different eras. Who was greater: Jack Johnson or Muhammad Ali, Wilt Chamberlain or Michael Jordan, Jack Nicklaus or Tiger Woods? So I’ll let baseball’s legion of addicts bicker over the hitting numbers, Bonds vs. Babe.
I’d submit that Ruth had one edge as a complete player. Before he became the Yankee home-run attraction, he was a superb Red Sox pitcher who won 18, 23 and 24 games in 1915-17. Unless Bonds develops a fast ball, he can’t match Ruth as a World Series winner as hurler and slugger. I agree, though, that Ruth played in an all-white game while Barry’s modern era of black, Latino and Asian players is faster, more athletic.
Quite right. Both men were phenomenal athletes in their time. Even without the drugs, though, one has to admit that Bonds stayed in better shape. And, let’s not forget, Bonds had hundreds of potential at bats in his prime wiped away because of labor disputes, something unthinkable in Ruth’s era.
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| Thursday, March 16, 2006 |
Barry Bonds will always hold a special place in my memory. As a 9 or 10 year old, he was a member of the first sports team I paid attention to and loved – the Pittsburgh Pirates. The four names I remember from that era were Barry Bonds, Andy Van Slyke (my favorite), Bobby Bonilla, and Jim Leyland. I can’t say I appreciated how good Bonds was. Even at that age, I disliked Bonds, though I can’t remember having a reason why. It may have been that everyone around me disliked the man, and I picked up on it. Van Slyke was cool, and I liked Bonilla as well. Leyland was a great manager. Bonds, however, was someone I was not fond of. He made it worse by leaving the team for the Giants. As a kid, I didn’t understand why the Pirates couldn’t hold on to their team and try to get to the World Series again. I also thought players were a bit more attached to the concept of “team”. Naive? Yes, but I still disliked Bonds all the more for leaving, and Bonilla and Van Slyke also suffered in my perception as the Pirates began their plunge into their current cellar dwelling ways.
As far as I can tell, Bonds wasn’t on steroids in Pittsburgh (this is confirmed by just about every reputable source out there). After he left, and the strike happened, I lost track of Barry Bonds. When Bonilla retired, I assumed Bonds must have retired while I wasn’t looking.
Then the home run race happened. Sammy Sosa and Mark McGuire tried to hit a lot of baseballs out of a lot of ballparks. I was rooting for Sosa, but remember hearing that Bonds was still around. I was surprised, but figured he had to be on the tail end of his career. It had been a long time since I had seen him in Pittsburgh, and hitters don’t last that long.
That’s when his hitting picked up. This seemed odd to me. By that point, I’d followed baseball long enough to know that this wasn’t right. As his hitting picked up, he started getting press. The pictures took me aback – Bonds looked nothing like how I remembered him. Comparison photos taken since prove this – Bonds looked like a totally different person. His head was a different shape, and his body was much more muscular than I remembered. Even then, I suspected him of steroids, but I wanted to give him the benefit of the doubt. After all, I felt I had been unfair on him when he left Pittsburgh. I’d seen how Pittsburgh fans treat their quarterbacks, so I knew that we were capable of assuming the worst of everyone who played in the ‘Burgh we didn’t like. Even so, I hated seeing Bonds surpass McGuire’s record. It seemed anti-climatic, like I had seen something that I had been told was a “once in a lifetime” event for the second time, cheapening that event. Also, of all people in baseball to get this record, Bonds? BONDS? I had already had enough of this guy.
The instant he started talking about rubbing on cream he knew nothing about, I knew for sure. Bonds was on steroids. Nothing he could say after that would change my mind on that fact.
Barry Bonds should keep the records he gets to. No asterisk should be placed by his name. It won’t ever have to be. Thanks to this era, everyone will remember that the accomplishments were tainted. The history of baseball will not let us forget – unlike many sports, baseball has a long memory. Had Pete Rose been in the NFL, he would have been reinstated by now. Baseball will never let him be reinstated. Bonds may not be banned, but he will forever be remembered as a surly cheat.
Cross posted at The Unusual Suspects.
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| Thursday, March 9, 2006 |
David Pinto, the pre-eminent baseball blogger, thinks there are a lot of holes in Game of Shadows, the forthcoming book that has made a splash charging that Barry Bonds used steroids.
He notes a contradiction. On the one hand, we are offered this about Bonds: “Most attributed the changes in Bonds’s body to a heavy workout regimen, as though a 34-year-old man could gain 15 pounds of muscle in 100 days without drugs.” Yet no one seems to bat an eye when told, “Giants starter Jason Schmidt changed his routine and spent part of his offseason at the Athletes Performance Institute in Tempe, Ariz. He played catch in the mornings with Boston’s Curt Schilling, took a crash course in nutrition and hit the weights diligently enough to add 20 pounds, while simultaneously shedding body fat.”
Quite true. And Bonds’ workout routine is legendary. Schmidt, by contrast has always been a little on the pudgy side.
Now, my inclination is that Bonds was indeed on the Juice. But we need more than mere innuendo to hang him for those suspicions.
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| Wednesday, March 8, 2006 |
ESPN senior national columnist Gene Wojciechowski thinks Barry Bond’s career is as good as over and his reputation permanently trashed.
In the end, there is only one question that needs to be asked:
Do you believe Barry Bonds, or the book?
If you believe Bonds, then you believe the third-leading home run hitter in the history of Major League Baseball is the victim of an unrelenting federal and media conspiracy designed to frame him for the use of performance-enhancing drugs.
If you believe the excerpts of “Game of Shadows,” then you believe that
Bonds and his mind-boggling, bloated numbers of 1998-2004 (he missed most of last season with an injury) are a fraud.
I believe the book. I think Bonds is — or was — a human Walgreens, a grotesque and insulting example of better baseball through chemistry. And I think he should slither away, joining Mark McGwire, Sammy Sosa and Rafael Palmeiro in forced baseball exile.
Bonds is finished. He might play again, but there is only a chalk outline left around his integrity and home run totals. And the only way he gets into Cooperstown is if he spends the $14.50 for a Hall of Fame admission ticket.
There’s a possibility that Wojciechowski is right. I doubt it, however.
The problem is that this whole era is similarly tainted. We’re pretty sure Bonds used the juice but so did many other players without his stats. How do we know which ones are “frauds” and which are legit?
Further, how much of Bonds’ performance can be attributed to the clear and the cream? He was a three-time league MVP back when he was skinny. And, of course, his recent rash of injuries might be steroids related, helping even out the advantage. He missed almost an entire season, after all.
Like it or not, we’re likely going to have to live with Bonds surpassing Babe Ruth and going to Cooperstown. His health will likely keep him from getting to Hank Aaron.
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| Tuesday, March 7, 2006 |
San Francisco Chronicle reporters Mark Fainaru-Wada and Lance Williams have written a book saying Barry Bonds started using steroids after the Mark McGwire-Sammy Sosa chase.
Barry Bonds began using steroids after the 1998 baseball season and came to rely on a wide variety of performance-enhancing drugs over the next several years, according to a book written by two Chronicle reporters and excerpted in this week’s Sports Illustrated. The excerpt offers the most comprehensive account of Bonds’ experience with steroids, tracing his involvement to the off-season following the historic home-run race featuring Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa. Bonds decided to use performance-enhancing substances after watching McGwire — whom the excerpt says he suspected was “a juicer” — gain national acclaim for eclipsing Roger Maris’ storied single-season record.
Bonds has denied using performance-enhancing drugs.
The excerpt paints a sweeping picture of Bonds’ thoughts about using steroids; the role of his weight trainer, Greg Anderson, in introducing him to specific drugs; how his choice of substances changed after he struggled with injuries and met Victor Conte, owner of the Bay Area Laboratory Co-Operative; and Bonds’ reaction as his once-supple body turned thick and muscle-bound.
[...]
“Game of Shadows: Barry Bonds, BALCO, and the Steroids Scandal that Rocked Professional Sports,” co-authored by Chronicle reporters Mark Fainaru-Wada and Lance Williams, is scheduled for publication March 27 by Gotham Books. The excerpt says Fainaru-Wada and Williams based their narrative “on more than a thousand pages of documents and interviews with more than 200 people, many of whom we spoke to repeatedly.”
From 2003 through 2005, Fainaru-Wada and Williams wrote nearly 100 stories for The Chronicle, lifting the BALCO investigation into an international story and eventually leading to congressional pressure that forced Major League Baseball to twice toughen its steroids policy.
The excerpt suggests Bonds was not truthful during his testimony before a federal grand jury in San Francisco on Dec. 4, 2003. Bonds testified that he used a clear substance and a cream supplied by BALCO, but he said he thought they were flaxseed oil and a rubbing balm for arthritis, The Chronicle previously reported. Bonds also flatly stated he never injected himself with drugs, according to a transcript of his testimony reviewed by the newspaper.
But the book excerpt in Sports Illustrated describes the way Bonds knowingly and meticulously used steroids — including “the clear” and “the cream” provided by BALCO — and even took control of his drug regimen when he disagreed with Anderson. The excerpt also says Bonds “learned how to inject himself” and describes one conversation with Anderson in which Bonds says of starting another drug cycle, “I’ll do it myself.”
[...]
The excerpt spells out in vivid detail what attracted Bonds to performance-enhancing drugs: his intense jealousy of McGwire’s 70-home run season and the national hero worship it created.
Bonds repeatedly made racially tinged remarks about McGwire to Bell, according to the excerpt, at one point saying of McGwire’s chase of Maris, “They’re just letting him do it because he’s a white boy.”
McGwire’s historic season drove Bonds to wander into territory he had previously avoided, according to the excerpt. “To Bonds it was a joke,” one passage reads. “He had been around enough gyms to recognize that McGwire was a juicer. Bonds himself had never used anything more performance enhancing than a protein shake from the health-food store. But as the 1998 season unfolded, and as he watched Mark McGwire take over the game — his game — Barry Bonds decided that he, too, would begin using what he called ‘the s — .’ “
The exerpt in question is supposed to be at SI’s website but what appears instead is a promotional section, “Bonds exposed Shadows details superstar slugger’s steroid use,” which notes “An excerpt of Game of Shadows that details Bonds’ steroid use appears exclusively in the March 13 issue of Sports Illustrated, which is available on newsstands beginning on Wednesday.” There are links to interviews with the authors, assessments by SI writers as to what it all means, a collection of Bonds quotes on steroids, and a photo gallery.
Not surprisingly, this is the cover story.
SI’s recap of the summary is longish, however, including details like this:
 The authors, Mark Fainaru-Wada and Lance Williams, describe in sometimes day-to-day, drug-by-drug detail how often and how deeply Bonds engaged in the persistent doping. For instance, the authors write that by 2001, when Bonds broke Mark McGwire’s single-season home-run record (70) by belting 73, Bonds was using two designer steroids referred to as the Cream and the Clear, as well as insulin, human growth hormone, testosterone decanoate (a fast-acting steroid known as Mexican beans) and trenbolone, a steroid created to improve the muscle quality of cattle.
BALCO tracked Bonds’ usage with doping calendars and folders — detailing drugs, quantities, intervals and Bonds’ testosterone levels — that wound up in the hands of federal agents upon their Sept. 3, 2003 raid of the Burlingame, Calif., business.
Depending on the substance, Bonds used the drugs in virtually every conceivable form: injecting himself with a syringe or being injected by his trainer, Greg Anderson, swallowing pills, placing drops of liquid under his tongue, and, in the case of BALCO’s notorious testosterone-based cream, applying it topically.
According to the book, Bonds gulped as many as 20 pills at a time and was so deeply reliant on his regimen that he ordered Anderson to start “cycles” — a prescribed period of steroid use lasting about three weeks — even when he was not due to begin one. Steroid users typically stop usage for a week or two periodically to allow the body to continue to produce natural testosterone; otherwise, such production diminishes or ceases with the continued introduction of synthetic forms of the muscle-building hormone.
One wonders how MLB will respond to all this.
Update: ESPN weighs in with some other information gleaned from the SI excerpt:
• Bonds was motivated to take performance-enhancing drugs by the Mark McGwire-Sammy Sosa chase of the single-season home run record in 1998 and he had never taken any before 1998.
• Through research, Bonds developed a deep knowledge of performance enhancers. He even talked, through third parties, to medical authorities who advised him not to use steroids.
• He began with Winstrol after the 1998 season. He also worked out extensively, sometimes spending 12 hours a day at the gym where he met the Weight Guru, who turned out to be Greg Anderson.
• He also took Deca-Durabolin. By 2001, the authors allege, he was using two designer steroids referred to as the Cream and the Clear, as well as insulin, human growth hormone, testosterone decanoate (a fast-acting steroid known as Mexican beans) and trenbolone, a steroid created to improve the muscle quality of cattle. That’s the same year Bonds broke Mark McGwire’s single-season home-run record (70) by belting 73.
• He got the substances from Anderson, his personal trainer who became a San Francisco Giants employee. Anderson got them from BALCO labs, headed by Victor Conte. Anderson’s employment by the Giants irked the team’s training staff, according to the excerpt. The Giants also did a background check, discovering that “World Gym was known as a place to score steroids and that Anderson himself was rumored to be a dealer. But the club decided it didn’t want to alienate Bonds on this issue, either. The trainers stayed.”
• Despite seeing a big change in Bonds’ physical appearance, Giants officials did not challenge their star for fear of upsetting him. “The Giants, from owner Peter Magowan to manager Dusty Baker, had no interest in learning whether Bonds was using steroids, either,” the excerpt contends. “Although it was illegal to use the drugs without a prescription, baseball had never banned steroids. Besides, by pursuing the issue, the Giants ran the risk of poisoning their relationship with their touchy superstar — or, worse, of precipitating a drug scandal the year before the opening of their new ballpark, where Bonds was supposed to be the main gate attraction.”
• Anderson kept meticulous records on Bonds’ program, many of them on a computer. At times, Bonds gulped as many as 20 pills at a time. He also learned to inject himself.
• Bonds had a relationship with Kimberly Bell, a woman he met in the Candlestick Park parking lot in 1994 while he was married. Bonds even put a downpayment on a house for Bell in Arizona from monies he made from card-show appearances (and didn’t report as income). She claims he later threatened to kill her.
• According to the excerpt, Anderson told an acquaintance who was wearing a wire in 2003 that: “The whole thing is, everything I’ve been doing, it’s all undetectable. The stuff I have, we created it. You can’t buy it anywhere else; you can’t get it anywhere else. You can take [it] the day of [a drug test], pee, and it comes up clear.
“See, like Marion Jones and them — it’s the same stuff they went to the Olympics with and they test them every f—— week. So that’s why I know it works, so that’s why I know we’re not in trouble. So that’s cool.”
• Bonds had immunity in grand jury testimony from everything but perjury. He claimed in testimony that he didn’t know what Anderson was giving him. “At the end of [the] 2002, 2003 season, when I was going through [a bad period,] my dad died of cancer…. I was fatigued, just needed recovery you know, and this guy says, ‘Try this cream, try this cream,’” he said. “And Greg came to the ballpark and said, you know, ‘This will help you recover.’ And he rubbed some cream on my arm … gave me some flaxseed oil, man. It’s like, ‘Whatever, dude.’ ”
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