Barry Bonds - 756

Ok, he hit it. Barry Bonds hit his 756th career home run. While I have somewhat mixed feelings about it, I will say I’m glad its over and done.

For those of you who don’t follow baseball, Barry Bonds is a pretty damn good baseball player, even if you don’t count the whole “home run thing”. He’s been in 14 all star games, has received 8 golden glove awards, and has been selected MVP 7 times, (more than anyone else- 2nd place is 3 times which Mickey Mantle, Yogi Berra, Stan Musial, among others, all have been given the award only 3 times). He also holds the single season home run record (73) in addition to, as of August 7th, 2007, the all time home run record (756). Overall, a very talented ball player, both defensively and offensively.

Oh, and he’s accused of knowingly using performance enhancing drugs.

Oh, and so is nearly all of baseball.

No, I don’t want to debate if he used steroids or performance enhancing drugs or if he knew about it. I think nearly everyone in baseball took some level of performance enhancing drugs. Whether is was full on steroids or just stuff that made you recover from injuries faster, whatever- I think the bottom line is it was all over the game.

Really, admit that baseball was WAY TOO lax in testing so many baseball players took steroids. People talk like this is the only guy who took steroids and its “tainting” baseball. No, HUNDREDS of players took steroids and while it might be tainting the records, what can we do about it? Deny everyone who played in the 1990’s entrance into the fall of fame because they probably took steroids? I mean, really, the only players who are admitting it are sub-par players whose use of performance enhancing drugs (PED) didn’t do enough to for them to get them anywhere significant in the game. They were crappy players who became “OK” players. So what do they have to lose by telling everyone they took steroids? They aren’t damaging their chances of getting into the hall of fame-they’ll only get in with paid admission anyway.

By that rationale, if tons of players were on PED, doesn’t that make it an almost even playing field? I mean, there aren’t tons of players who are sitting on 756 home runs. There’s one. If the use of PED alone makes that much difference that he shouldn’t be allowed in the hall of fame, then gosh, why aren’t there tons of records being broken each and every year by all the players who used? If PEDs have that much power, then we should have many many many phenomenal players from the 90’s ‘Roid Days, but we don’t. So it doesn’t.

In my opinion, Barry Bonds is a hall of fame quality player anyway-look at the golden gloves, the MVP awards, the all star game appearances. Maybe it shouldn’t be the 756 home runs that gets him into the hall of fame-maybe without drugs he would’ve only hit 701, who knows? We can’t rewind time and if he’s smart, he’ll never admit anything. But the way I look at it, is IF he took drugs, then they made a great player phenomenal. And that’s something that you just can’t do with drugs. So to all the sub-par players, the writers who never played or were never any good, the ones who took the PED’s and it didn’t make them phenomenal, quit your bitching and be happy people go to games so you all have a fucking job.