A Real Creep of a Creeping Man
[Bwahaha! Yes, it’s another Sadly, Sports! post. Today the Mitchell Report was released; I’m reading it right now.]
Sherlock Holmes vs. Barry Bonds:
Well, thanks to you, Mr. Holmes, it is very clear that we have traced the evil to its source.”
“The real source,” said Holmes, “lies, of course, in that [petulant, megalomaniacal desire for the home run title] which gave [Barry Bonds] the idea that he could only gain his wish by turning himself into a younger man. When one tries to rise above Nature one is liable to fall below it. The highest type of man may revert to the animal if he leaves the straight road of destiny.” He sat musing for a little with the phial in his hand, looking at the clear liquid within. “When I have written to [BALCO] and told [them] that I hold [them] criminally responsible for the poisons which [they] circulate[..], we will have no more trouble. But it may recur. Others may find a better way. There is danger there — a very real danger to humanity. Consider, Watson, that the material, the sensual, the worldly would all prolong their worthless lives. The spiritual would not avoid the call to something higher. It would be the survival of the least fit. What sort of cesspool may not our poor world become?”
One doesn’t have to buy Holmes’s Edwardian notions of “Nature” nor Conan Doyle’s personal and (it must be said) pathetic ideas of “the spiritual” to appreciate the eloquent and timeless point that an obsessive and demented desire for a prize unattainable via fair channels inspires criminality of all sorts, moral and legal.
This is about more than sports; it’s about the principle of fair play. Too often cheating goes unpunished. Republicans steal elections, people who mark cards win pots, Barry Bonds cheated to break the two most famous records in baseball.
And, what’s more, every indication is that he didn’t desire the records just for their own sake, or for the generic cause of glory. No, that would be banal. That was the cause of McGwire’s and Sosa’s cheating, and they were mere pikers at the art of acquiring what is undeserved. Bonds wanted the records because he thought he was owed. Bonds was seething with resentment that not only was someone out there better than he at an aspect of hitting, but that someone was seen as being better; the funny thing about the ego of a certain kind of sociopath is that it really does worry about society’s opinion, really does fret over what history might judge. (The irony here, of course, is that Bonds always wanted to appear exactly opposite: daring the law to prosecute him, sneering at fans, practically spitting on journalists. Yet the obnoxiousness was not affected; Bonds really did want to be worshiped by those he abused and despised.)
Well, a consensus is needed. Every decent person has a stake in making sure that cheaters — especially those in a famous or important context — come to justice. And whether the justice meted is legal or merely karmic, the important thing for the society and culture is that both the cheater and the means by which he cheated are conclusively and forever disgraced.
Unfortunately, there are knee-jerk contrarians out there, those who mistake overdogs for underdogs, those who practice the most weaselfied sophistry imaginable and get special pleasure when doing so for the sake of scumbags, those who can’t discern honorable rogues from real menaces to decency. To crib (by memory, so caveat lector) from Gore Vidal: “Americans worship psychopaths, [Barry Bonds] being to the national disease what Robin Hood was to a greener, saner world.”
Before I was a blogger, most of my online activity was confined to baseball message boards. I’ve followed the rise and fall of not just Barry Bonds, but of his rabid defenders. I’ve heard all the excuses and laughed at all the rationalizations, some of my favorites of which are:
- That no one before produced at Bonds’s level even at an age at which most athletes are in steep decline is simply testament to Bonds’s unique nature as a eugenic wonder.
Rebuttal: It’s probably true that, as the son of a baseball player, Bonds had a genetic advantage. But so what? So was Dale Berra, and no one ever thought he was destined to be the National Pastime’s Kwisatz Haderach, meant to defy all laws of space, time, statistics.
- That an unprecedented spike in power came when Bonds was 36 years old isn’t unique in the annals of baseball: Why, Lee Lacy also had a late-career power spike! Lee Lacy, for God’s sake.
Rebuttal: Bonds never hit more than 49 HRs in a season; at age 36 he hit 73. There simply is no analogue in history to a spike of this sort at the age at which it came. It’s like hearing that Carey Roberts won the Boston Marathon or that Daffyd ab Hugh competes in Iron Man contests or that Ben Shapiro has laid more women than Peter North: it’s so improbable that it’s practically impossible; more to the point, it stinks — so much so that the burden of proof rested on those who insisted Bonds’s record was cleanly got.
- That accusations of cheating come merely from the bitter, the vindictive, the jealous, the wicked. Unless proof [the impossibly high standards of which, insisted upon in massive bad faith, one can imagine] emerges that Bonds did steroids, all accusations of cheating amount to “character assassination.”
Rebuttal: ‘Pot, kettle, black’ does not begin to describe the hilarious irony of Bonds’s defenders charging their opponents with the exact character flaws which… caused their idol to cheat in the first place. And as for the proof thing: well, the evidence continues to stockpile.
- That if St. Bonds the Oppressed indeed used steroids, then this is not cheating, as it is substantively no different than vitamins and mineral supplements, LASIK operations, or Tommy John surgery (this steaming pile of sophistry is favored by the lawyers of the Bonds Brigade).
Rebuttal: Leaving aside the legality/contract issues (which do pertain, despite myths to the contrary: it was a breach of the rules of baseball to use illegal drugs), the distinction here lies mostly with the issue of intent. LASIK and TJ surgery are restorative and compensatory procedures. That they have been abused goes without saying; that their original purpose of restoring what age and injury had taken away also goes without saying. With a few red herring exceptions, no baseball player with normal health and talent has an incentive to go under the knife or to sit in front of the laser; a devious ballplayer, on the other hand, has every incentive to use steroids to boost his power.
There’s also the issue of category as well as of degree. What is a Performance Enhancing Drug (PED), anyway? It is, I think, something that can make a good player great and a great player God-like. It is not, I think, something that, at best, merely “keeps the player going” at his previous level. This is the crucial distinction shit upon by those among the Bonds Brigade who insist that, if Bonds cheated by using steroids, then the great players of the 60’s and 70’s cheated by using speed, and therefore the point is moot and St. Barry is redeemed. Yet, the players of the 60’s and 70’s were a notoriously hard-partying lot, and also much less pampered than players of today. Speed helped them to overcome the wear of a grueling travel schedule; and, yes, it also helped them overcome the effects of hangover. In other words, it kept them in the line-up; it didn’t change their very identities as players, by which I mean, it did not physically transform them into record-destroying monsters. Taking speed might have meant beating out an extra infield grounder now and then; it didn’t mean adding another 10-20 HRs to their tally every year. Put more plainly, speed might add a step lost to fatigue or hangover; steroids definitely add distance to fly balls hit by pampered players in optimal health, distance that never could have been achieved “naturally.” As such, the use of steroids and, probably, HGH constitutes cheating — something akin to playing with a bionic limb — while use of any number of items in the laundry list of other drugs, supplements, and procedures does not[1].
Just as interesting and entertaining (if I’m to be generous), or just as pathetic and crapulent (if I’m to be truthful) as the arguments defending Bonds are the characters of the defenders themselves. So far as I can tell, they fall into the following categories:
- Giants Fans.
I don’t know what the fuck is in the water in San Francisco, but — let’s just say — I begin to better understand the origins of the Twinkie Defense the more I observe the depravity of Giants fans. If Adolf Hitler batted clean-up for the Giants, he would surely, both literally and symbolically, be given the key to the city; and a great legion of morally-retarded pukefaces would troll the internets to praise his virtues. I have never seen a fan base more hell-bent on deifying jackasses[2]: Will Clark, Jeffrey Leonard, Barry Bonds — hell, even Dave Fucking Kingman had his admirers in San Fran. In contrast, Chicago soured on cheater Sosa, McGwire’s name is mud in St. Louis, Baltimoreans never really gave much of a shit about Raffy Palmeiro, and no one anywhere, at any time, truly cared about Jose Canseco.
- Low-information Liberals.
These are the folks who don’t follow baseball, but are sure that when a black man is disliked, it’s only because of racism.
Bleh. Actually, all cheaters are disliked. But Bonds is a special case because he is the most ostentatious cheater, the guy who obviously cheated for the worst reasons and in the most spectacular and sneering manner, the cheater who is the most gigantic asshole EVAR. He’s also the guy who stole the most important record in baseball from Henry Aaron, another black man but one who, unlike the sheltered and spoiled Bonds, actually had to deal with the most horrible manifestations of racism firsthand. Those who defend Bonds on grounds of race might as well, while they’re at it, defend Ward Connerly, as they’ve both padded their resumes by defecating on the accomplishments of Civil Rights pioneers, just as they have both cynically used the same generation of pioneers as a shield when people have called them on their bullshit.
- Statheads.
The perfect political analogy to this bunch are the Jacobins. Their movement started righteously, their cause initially just, but then they went way too fucking far. Now the descendants of Bill James’s revolution have as much resemblance [3] to their ancestors as the most bloodthirsty sans-culottes had to poor Tom Paine. The early sabermetricians tried to wed objectivity (or, what they reasonably and in good faith thought was objectivity) to traditional analysis. But nowadays they are mere reactionaries and reductionists.[4]
What are professional sports journalists for? Statheads, knee-jerk-like, are against it. What are professional sports commentators (especially the much-hated Joe Morgan, who’s forgotten more about baseball than these socially-inept numerologists could ever learn even if they managed to keep their spreadsheets from sticking together) against? Statheads, just as reflexively, are for it. Most journalists and commentators disliked Bonds because of his personality, lack of hustle, and off-the-field shenanigans. The statheads’ response was, therefore, Pavlovian.
It was also religious: Every time Bonds sneered at a reporter, statheads cheered and studied the text of the story for clues on how to better battle the devil journalists rather like Christians study the stories of their God and His prophets. Such was the psychological and religious connection between Bonds and his idolators that any Bonds quote amounted to St. Barry’s latest epistle to the EqAtions; meanwhile, stories unfavorable to Bonds inspired the sort of stake-burning demonstrations of wrath that can only come from the True Believer when confronting heresy. Yes, it was that bad — I saw it and laughed at it as it happened. And now that the trick cigar of Bonds’s legal situation has exploded, I’m damn well going to take the opportunity to point and laugh at their singed and stupid faces. How do you like your brown-eyed cheater now, Mr. Fucking Stathead?
- Glibertarians/Randroids.
The worst people in the world, over-represented on baseball sites as they are at so many other spots on the internets, these idiots see Bonds as John Galt and Bonds’s detractors as Looters and Moochers. They claim to admire principled excellence, but in reality what they truly admire is ruthlessness. Thus defending Bonds becomes an irresistible vocation for the Randroids who furiously type in so many parents’ basements nick-named ‘The Gulch’. Like the wheelchaired fraud in The Big Lebowski, Bonds claims to have “[gone] out and achieved,” when in fact he has used dishonest means to acquire what was not his. Irony? I’m afraid it’s lost on such people, just as it (and its cousin, humor) were lost on the Original Randroid herself, Miss Rosenbaum. For Bonds, the end justified the means because that is what his ego demanded. For Randroids, this — megalomania cum sociopathy — is the real “highest ideal” — and why, come to think of it, they can so easily advocate bombing civilians.
[1] A possible exception: Let’s consider Tim Raines in his cokehead period during the early 80s. Let’s say he singles. He’s on first, and the first base coach, exploiting a rift in the space-time continuum to make the process invisible to umpires and crowd, manages to blow, Stevie Nicks style, a straw-full of coke in whatever orifice is..handy. Raines, instantly if briefly wired, gains a half-step in speed and steals 2nd base. This indeed would be cheating on par with Bonds’s.
[2] Well, ok, I have.
[3] Though with regard to Bonds, they are as one.
[4] Check out this thread, specifically post #23, the author of which is one Voros McCracken, who parlayed his invention of a junk stat (DIPS) into a job with the Boston Red Sox. No doubt some day he will construct a perfect spreadsheet detailing just how much his mother loves him, using complex metrics quantifying such variables as ‘cookie-baking’, ‘smoochies’, and ‘laying out your jammie-jams.’
This can’t be a sports post, too many words.
Good compendium, HTML.
Yes, the usual suspects are there. Yes, it’s bad, bad, bad. But here’s another way of looking at this: How about some of the guys who aren’t implicated?
Manny, Ortiz, ARod, Jeter, Vlad, Pedro, etc. Doesn’t that make these guys’ substantial accomplishments even better? That Bonds cheating to breat the cheater McGwire’s record sucks. But to think that ARod will smash the fuck out of 762 with a clean bill of health makes me truly appreciate the guy’s talent, even if I’ll never really like him.
Wow. I need steroids to get through this post.
One of the things that makes sports better than politics is that the stakes are so much lower.
And one of the things that makes politics better than sports is that the stakes are so much higher.
Who’s Barry Bond?
Hey, check out this story about a Muslim saving a group of Jews aboard an NYC subway:
http://www.nypost.com/seven/12122007/news/regionalnews/jews_subway_hero_a_muslim_381263.htm
…and look at this hilarious response from those comedic geniuses at IMAO:
http://www.imao.us/archives/009305.html
Ahhh, a stathead diss like all the other stathead disses. Statheads aren’t “wrong,” per se, but they’re certainly SPIRITUALLY wrong! Burned!
Watch “Around the Horn.” Read your local sports columnist. Read the ones who win awards.
The great majority of them are idiots. Paid to write about gamers and heart and giving 110% and day-in-and-day-out and a bunch of other stuff that doesn’t matter at all in terms of Being Good At Sports.
Statheads are knee-jerk against it much in the way I’m knee-jerk against kicking puppies. Because, you know, it’s pretty much the wrong thing to do.
You’re actually correct, though you didn’t mean to be.
Point 1: Joe Morgan once knew more about baseball than I know now, at the peak of my baseball-knowing abilities.
Point 2: Then Joe Morgan forgot everything he knew about baseball.
Point 3:Thus, he did indeed forget more about baseball than I’ll ever know.
However, this does not excuse him from Point 2.
It’s been said and said and said. Joe Morgan the player was a brilliant and clever man who made twice the best of his God-given talents. Joe Morgan the everything else is a bitter blowhard who doesn’t do a lick of research, is constantly proved the complete opposite of correct on about half of what he says on any given broadcast, and who is prone to bleat out ridiculous buzzwords (consistency! consistency!) in lieu of actual analysis.
You know of firejoemorgan. I know you do. Go back to it. Read the JoeChats. Read the Joe quotes. Don’t try to tell me this man is anything other than wrong, wrong, wrong, WRONG.
Some are like this (the “Sabernomics” author). Some aren’t (aformentioned FJM d00dz).
I’m a stathead who thinks Bonds did roids and shouldn’t be as surly as he is. So.
How is DiPS a “junk stat”? It makes perfect sense. Pitchers can’t necessarily control balls that are hit in the vicinity of their players, thus it pays to strike hombres out.
It baffles my brain that we’ve come to accept the circus-of-numbers that QB ratings give us, but the minute someone talks about anything other than AVG and ERA, the la-la-la-la-la-la-can’t-hear-you routine begins.
Also, nary a mention of Clemens. How interesting.
I suspect that nobody is going to do a remake of field of dreams in 50 years with Bonds instead of Shoeless Joe.
Because I wrote almost all of this before the report came out. Now that I’m reading it and see who’s been busted, everything I said about Bonds goes for Clemens, too.
Okay, I take that part back.
Amen, HTML.
But to think that ARod will smash the fuck out of 762 with a clean bill of health makes me truly appreciate the guy’s talent, even if I’ll never really like him.
One can only hope, though in the best of all possible worlds, ARod smashes the record, but never wins a World Series, and is forever despised by Yankee fans, who will see him as a choke artist and “not a true Yankee,” even if he hits 900 homers.
Dude!
Have you seen this?
It’s way off-topic, but it sounds kind of like Beaker wrote a parody of “The Twelve Days of Christmas” and then found twelve more brain dead Repugs to actually perform it.
(Althought they might have cribbed it from Mallard Fillmore.)
One can only hope, though in the best of all possible worlds, ARod smashes the record, but never wins a World Series, and is forever despised by Yankee fans, who will see him as a choke artist and “not a true Yankee,” even if he hits 900 homers.
Ahh my fondest dream- that, and the Mariners win every World Series for the next 5 years.
I never hit a lady, but I really want to punch the “HILLLAREEEEEEEEEEEEES WOOOOOOODTOCK MUSEEEEEYUUUUUUMMMMMMMM” woman square in the face.
There is only one solution to the problem of performance enhancing drugs in baseball, football, or any other sport (I’m looking at you, Lance Legstrong):
Random, year-round blood testing.
All this boo-hooing about “no valid test for HGH” and “how can the testers stay ahead of the cheaters?” bullshit evaporates in the face of blood testing.
If you took it, it’s in your blood. End of story.
No Whizzinator, no B-samples, no appeals.
Of course players, owners and independent athletes will fight tooth-and-claw against it, but if they want any shred of honesty and respectability restored to the sporting world, there is only one way to expiation.
Blood.
Wow. HRC’s Woodstock museum? Uh, Al Franken ranting? Bad approval ratings (not pictured: that the GOP is bringing this number down, not Democrats)? One Democratic scandal, cuz, you know, there haven’t been any at all from the other side?
That’s some thick sauce there.
It took Bonds to drag you out into the light?
I tried to read that .pdf, but its like 409 pages. Not gonna do it.
What about Clemens?
As for A-Rod, he’s clearly smarter than the average cheater.
Instead of ordering his HGH and other goodies online from an American supplier and paying for it with his own credit card, fa Chrissakes, I’m quite sure he sends an acquaintance to Mexico with a suitcase full of cash.
Just like Legstrong, I find it incredibly difficult to believe that someone who isn’t cheating can not only beat the cheaters but crush them into irrelevance.
In fact, I tried to find the players involved, but fell asleep on my keyboard after only scanning two hundred pages.
I now have keys pressed into my forehead.
Don’t be talking shit about Conan Doyle. William Safire made that mistake with me once and after my multiple email exchange with him look where he is now. You don’t want to go there.
Is that Christmas video one of the dumbest things ever? I suggest a new level of conservative dumbness just for that awful thing. That means Mallard FIllmore, Thomas Sowell, Day by Day, Jonah Goldberg and even Michelle Malkin just moved up a notch.
Congratulations, guys!
I’m going to take up an inordinate amount of time to comment here.
Re: steroids in sports.
So what? If an asshole is dumb enough to poison his body for the fleeting fame that a record holds, or the small promise of a megamillion contract if he performs that much better than everyone else, let him I say.
Baseball’s obligation to athletes in terms of doping should be this: show them video and photographs of Lyle Alzado and Ken Caminiti just before each of them died of cancer, likely induced by steroid use.
You want to cut 40 years off your life? Be our guest!
Likewise, if EVERYONE has access to ‘roids, suddenly those “remarkable accomplishments” of Bonds et al become pedestrian.
In addition, the owners ought to pay a very very harsh fine to the Players’ Assn for this. Why?
After 1994’s strike, baseball was desperate for good news. Voila, miracle of miracles, McGwire and Sosa have their tete a tete HR derby. Ripken has his Ironman streak (possibly not roided, but I wouldn’t put it past Cal).
BASEBALL’S OWNERS PROFITED MIGHTILY FROM THE USE OF STEROIDS, and for them to suddenly get all red-faced and tut-tuttish about their use is hypocrisy on the order of magnitude of the Bush administration (which many of them supported). They paid these contracts with the incentive clauses and then pretended that the players were pure as snow, meanwhile knowing the guys were juicing.
Steroids put baseball back on the map, and these guys ought to be ashamed for themselves.
comsympinko said,
December 13, 2007 at 23:54
Just like Legstrong, I find it incredibly difficult to believe that someone who isn’t cheating can not only beat the cheaters but crush them into irrelevance.
Because he has the love of Jesus in his baby hazel eyes, you deny him his glory? /snark
Baseball players take performance enhancing substances.
In other news, hollywood types have plastic surgery.
I guess I’m one of those idiotic statheads who allows reason and empirical data to determine his response to sports, and not what frequently alcoholic, bitter old men say about the young men they’re in no small part simply jealous of.
I don’t understand why you suspend your reason in regards to baseball, HTML. You’re a brilliant person, this is beneath you.
Whoa. Damn.
To briefly recap.
1.) I like baseball. Going to baseball games is fun. Watching baseball is entertainment. The pennant races ROCK. Baseball does actually enhance my life.
2.) I don’t care if they use drugs, or robotics, or DNA or jetpacks. It doesn’t affect my life. And know what? Over 162 game season, it just isn’t going to have much of an effect on the outcome. Too many other factors in play.
3.) Did Bonds and Clemens and Sheffield and MacGuire cheat? Sure they did. So did Perry with the spitter, Ford with the scuffball, Marichal with the aggravated assault. Hell, Sal Maglie would throw at batters heads. Baseball has always embraced a culture of “if you can get away with it, it’s ok”, that’s part of the charm of the game. THATS the real point of the people who bring up greenies. You can split hairs all you want about whether or not they are “Performance enhancing drugs” according to YOUR convenient definition, but they ARE cheating. Again, and so what? Baseball’s inherent value to me, the fan, is not lessened. It’s actually increased.
4.) But jeesus gawd, you guys and your worked up into some kind of righteous fury just make me laugh. It’s not a big deal. It doesn’t change anything. Val Kilmer was high when he played Doc Holliday. Does that somehow lessen the joy I get from merely observing the performance? Cripes, dood, on the global scale of things to get crazy with the righteous indignation over, a bunch of professional athlete/entertainers taking drugs has to rank right up there with those lowlifes at the Star Registry. It sucks, but not enough to earn more than a passing shake of the head.
Baseball is not life and death. Baseball is not religion, it is not politics, it is not warfare. It is entertainment. Now you can dislike Bonds for a lot of reasons, and much as you can’t bring yourself to admit it, you can like him for a lot of reasons too. You can actually do both and not have your own head explode. But the frantic level of angry hatred and spittle-spewing outrage you work yourself into around the subject of this specific baseball player is hard to understand or justify, m’man.
Just sayin…
mikey
I hate steroids. I like stats. I think there is ground that loves stats and hates steroids. What I really want is for someone to hold DA’s head, it is gonna blow!!!!!!!
It’s a 100% ironclad rule that every word HTML Mencken writes has negative value. Thus, the more he writes, the more worthless it is. He is the only Sadly, No! writer who can’t be concise, and not coincidentally the only one who can’t be funny.
The only thing I’ll say—speaking as a Giants fan who doesn’t like steroids, used to like Barry Bonds, and then didn’t like him—is that it is the biggest pile of bullshit to claim that San Francisco fans are somehow especially stupid or amoral for cheering for Bonds. Hey, guess what: every team’s fans like their players and root for them despite their flaws. Cardinals fans are this way with McGwire, Yankee fans with Giambi; it’s just that Barry is the best, most accomplished, and most (in)famous of the cheaters and so the cognitive dissonance is greater. Fans like their players to do well, and they’ll suspend common sense in order to support them; what a revelation. Next: an expose about how Mets fans boo umpires’ calls against the Mets…even when the umpire is clearly correct!
Also, everything Mencken says about “statheads” is completely high.
Thank you for your time.
It should be pointed out that steroids weren’t against MLB rules when most of this stuff was going on.
So Bonds saw McGwire and Sosa break the single-season HR record, with the aid of steroids, and decided he should get some steroids too.
I don’t think that’s sociopathic. He knew he could outhit them, and that the record was already tainted. Why not shatter it?
Not an excuse or a justification, but it’s easy to see how the steroid era could keep escalating when MLB rules didn’t address the problem.
Thanks Mikey; well said.
I was gonna reply, tomemos, but my attention span couldn’t last the length of your comment. Sorry.
The fact is, Democrats knew about this YEARS ago and did NOTHING. They are the real criminals and should be in jail.
PP — After vomiting through DA’s two Bonds hagiographies posted here, I figure he owes me.
Merry Christmas everyone! Ho ho ho!
That’s pretty rich for someone who just wrote a six-page post about a guy who everyone has already agreed to hate.
Adolf Hitler batted clean-up for the Giants, he would surely, both literally and symbolically, be given the key to the city; and a great legion of morally-retarded pukefaces would troll the internets to praise his virtues.
Damn, you almost had me, until you found it necessary to invoke Godwin’s Law.
It’s just a fucking game, ferchrissakes.
Oh, and what mikey said.
T-Fly–
Emphatically not true.
Drugs of any type without a valid physician’s prescription have been illegal in Major League Baseball since 1971.
Steroids, amphetamines, HGH, etc. certainly fall into this category.
Where did these guys come from? This reminds me of the time I left the half eaten banana out, and in the morning there were fruit flies as far as the eye could see.
Obviously, baseball threads are the half-eaten banana.
Obviously, tomemooose, you never saw the wingnut look-alikes post.
You must be new around here, huh?
I tink the bestest things is hugs.
“American’s”, Saul? The possessive form?
I think the British call that the Green Grocer’s Apostrophe.
I’d like to play football with you, dood. Except that everyone would be mad at me for creaming the teenager.
Well, the jury’s still out on the question of racism.
If a white guy (Clemens) uses steroids, breaks records, and gets into the Hall of Fame, while a black guy (Bonds) uses steroids, breaks records, is refeused entry into the Hall of Fame, what would you call that?
Actually, I’ve been reading S,N! for years. And yes, Wingnut Look-alikes was very long and also very funny. I didn’t remember that that was HTML; if so, credit where credit is due. Everything else from him has been a torment, though.
BondsBush wanted therecordsWhite House because he thought he was owed.BondsBush was seething with resentment that not only was someone out there better than he at an aspect ofhittingdishonest politics, but that someone was seen as being better; the funny thing about the ego of a certain kind of sociopath is that it really does worry about society’s opinion, really does fret over what history might judge.Everything I know about the game of baseball I learned from watching Princess Nine anime, but the Wiccans will tell you: As above, so below.
Warren Harding and “Shoeless Joe” were just amateurs at this stuff; in our modern era, both tyrant and serf are meaner, more self-obsessed, and ‘gifted’ with both technologies and cheering sections unimaginable to their ancestors.
I just think it is interesting that I don’t remember seeing you comment. could’ve happened, as I am stoned most of the time, and might have missed it, but seriously.
If you don’t like the post, try mikey’s approach.
Ad Hominem attacks just make you look like a troll.
(Unless said attacks are directed at the likes of Kevin and Saul, that is.)
I haven’t spent much time commenting here. If you say that’s “interesting,” I’ll take your word for it. Do I need a license, or a waiting period, or something?
Ad Hominem attacks just make you look like a troll.
Well, that’s fair. Of course, he did say that everyone from my geographical area would approve of a baseball-playing Hitler, and said that a “great legion” of us were “morally-retarded pukefaces,” but I guess I should learn deference and respect in the presence of the Master.
No, but snarkily refuting him is a hundred times more effective than calling him dumb or something, that’s all I’m saying…
Plus, its funnier.
Tomemos: HTML is the reason I started reading Sadly, No! I am very fond of all the regulars here, but I’m especially pleased to log on and discover a new HTML Mencken post, because I know I’ll enjoy reading it (and probably learn something) even when it’s about a topic I’m not usually drawn to. But then, I’m old, and therefore I learned to read back when even the average American had an attention span longer than that of a meth-addled fruit fly floating in a tub of Mountain Dew.
I have a new goal.
Oh, and as to this
you gloss over the fact Bonds hit those 49 the year before he hit 73. The year prior to hitting 49 he hit 34 in 100 games and change, a pace which works out to somewhere around 50 hr in a full season.
Hank Aaron hit his career high of 47 at age 37. That Bonds’ single season record year was such an outlier is not evidence he had to have cheated, unless you mean every record is broken via cheating. A record is, by definition, a statistical outlier. Maris’s next highest season was 39 the year before 61, and after that only 33.
I’m not going to be thick and say Bonds didn’t cheat in spirit, if not in actual, documented fact (that uncited MLB rule reference above is questionable to me, as the owners specifically had to push to get the players’ union to accept steroids becoming a punishable offense in the last contract. If it was already on the books it wouldn’t have needed negotiation) but, as Will Carroll at BP keeps pointing out, tho his association with stats makes him obviously someone to be dismissed, there’s no definitive proof steroids make you better at playing baseball. Ruben Sierra bulked himself out of the game for a few years. And to give McGwire and Sosa a partial pass simply for doing it first is ridiculous. Bonds, unlike McGwire or Sosa, carried his team to the World Series and damn near won it for them singlehandedly.
It seems like you want baseball to live up to the impossible ideals society itself will never meet, HTML. Nice dream, but they’re called impossible ideals for a reason. Demanding moral purity from a sport that was segregated for decades and plagued by game-fixing seems… not wise to me. As mikey pointed out, baseball is entertainment, and while Bonds cheated, in spirit, it was always with the intent of doing things that helped his team win.
And that, my friend Tomemos, is how it is done.
a different brad–
http://sports.espn.go.com/mlb/news/story?id=3153509
Scroll down about 3/4 of the way and you’ll plainly see that prescription drugs have been illegal without a physician’s script in MLB since 1971.
The fact that it has been ignored by both union and management remains a mystery.
And as for the issue of race, it’s not so simple as to say people dislike Barry Bonds simply because he’s black. Isolated instances aside, that’s not the case. But… how to say this, have you ever noticed that, to make a sweeping, and only founded on my own observations, generalization, that how much our media like a black athlete is strongly related to how often that black athlete smiles in public?
a different brad–
As for impossible ideals, blood testing makes the “impossible” possible and eliminates any and all ambiguity about whether the rules are being followed.
You fail, you lose, you’re done.
That is the true impossibility–they’ll never let it happen.
Everything I know about the game of baseball I learned from watching Princess Nine anime, but the Wiccans will tell you: As above, so below.
Warren Harding and “Shoeless Joe” were just amateurs at this stuff; in our modern era, both tyrant and serf are meaner, more self-obsessed, and ‘gifted’ with both technologies and cheering sections unimaginable to their ancestors.
Best. Comment. EVAR.
Bow before me!
Comsym- Curious. I can only guess lawyers interpreted the edict or its language to lack binding authority.
They’re just doping on the next generation of drugs, that there will be tests for just in time for gene doping to arrive, and all hell to break loose.
This genie ain’t going back in no bottle, sorry.
a different brad–
It’s a simple matter of conflict of interest.
In the seventies it was greenies, and no one wanted that to come out.
In the eighties it was coke, and no one wanted that to come out.
In the nineties it was steroids, and no one wanted that to come out.
Now it’s HGH and other designer PED’s, and no one wants that to come out.
Just because a rule is on the books doesn’t mean the authorities will enforce it.
Testing for these drugs is what was under negotiation in the 2002 collective bargaining agreement, not their illegality.
dude, come on – Joe Morgan is TERRIBLE
a different brad–
The genie can be put back if they go to blood testing.
There is no other way.
Except what if a substance can’t be detected in the blood, or they don’t know how to test for it, or they don’t even know it exists yet?
These aren’t hypothetical questions.
a different brad–
I sincerely hope that no one is so fuck-it-all stupid to mess with their own DNA just to hit a baseball, but that too could be detected by blood sampling.
I also think that gene doping will not be widely problematic due to the rarity of practitioners, at least for some time.
It’s not like there’s a genetic manipulation/cloning store around every corner.
a different brad–
You’ve got me there.
Supersecret labs that produce phantom PED’s and gene manipulation for the sole benefit of professional athletes could theoretically exist.
It’s just that most of that kind of research is way too expensive to be funded privately and is therefore subject to public oversight, usually by the university conducting the research.
If the leagues threw their weight behind it then I suppose it’s possible.
But even then most drugs and gene therapy would cause a change in a player’s genetic signature from a baseline that could be established when the player is first signed out of high school.
Ain’t many high schoolers can afford to bankroll their own biotech lab.
Biotech–the cause of and solution to all of life’s problems.
Talk about fantasy baseball! Hitler was a good utility infielder, but nothing special except that one good season (’38 or ’39?) & he’d lost even his defensive stuff by late ’43. Hell, he wouldn’t even have made it to “The Show” if that stadium hadn’t burned down & the Krauts hadn’t had to go w/ cheaper players to rebuild it.
Hitler would have been a second-rate player if they allowed Jews to play. The Juden Leagues had some great players.
I’m sure it gets dull to hear his name repeated, but Will Carroll at BP is the source of my rhetoric, tho I don’t mean to say I’m quoting him.
But there’s huge money in this. The NFL is a PED machine, but they have some sort of free pass in the press. There’s Olympic athletes, bodybuilders, bicyclists, world’s strongest man contestants, rich vain people, and who knows who else creating a market for it.
I hate to say,but ADB is right. blood tests need something to test for. Can’t test for a substance til you know about it.
new ones are being developed. You are always only testing for the last dope.
ps. HTML was not defending Joe Morgan. He was specifically calling him out. His point is that being right that Joe Morgan sux doesn’t make you right about anything else.
“And that, my friend Tomemos, is how it is done.”
With respect, please get bent. I put a reasoned argument in my comment, it wasn’t just ad hominem attacks. You can read it or not, but please don’t presume to teach me The Commenting Arts.
Kathleen,
ps. HTML was not defending Joe Morgan. He was specifically calling him out. His point is that being right that Joe Morgan sux doesn’t make you right about anything else.
Saying that Morgan “has forgotten more baseball than these etc. etc. ever knew” means that Morgan is vastly more knowledgeable than these other people. That’s what that idiom means. Plus, there’s no place where Mencken says that Morgan is bad, or that that’s something statheads (hate that term) are right about—he’s saying that whatever professional journalists, especially Morgan, say, stupid dumbhead nerdy bookworms will say the opposite.
So this is what is meant by “San Francisco values.” Glad I got out when I could, & moved some place decent & pure.
Kathleen–
All you need to test for is anomalous proteins and amino acids that are absent from/in excess of those in a normal blood sample.
Any performance enhancing drug/hormone is and will always be by necessity an incredibly complex organic molecule with numerous different proteins and amino acids that could not possibly be missed in a gas chromatographic or gel electrophoretic blood study.
I hate to break out the molecular biology on you guys, but the science of performance enhancement is light years away from (if ever) being able to enhance/alter the body’s performance without leaving behind massive amounts of organic molecular evidence.
Just because you don’t know what it is doesn’t mean it leaves no evidence.
You are always only testing for the last dope.
Right. The expert cheaters will always win. The inexpert cheaters let you pretend your sport is clean.
I fall in different places on the doping question: today I’ll err on the side of health. These guys are workers and workers should not have to destroy themselves to make a buck, healthy though those bucks are.
On a lighter note, cheating on the astral plane:
http://www.dallasobserver.com/2005-06-16/news/balls-out/
Just because you don’t know what it is doesn’t mean it leaves no evidence.
Okay Mr. Rumsfeld.
Righteous Bubba–
Again, these performance enhancers are not “dope.”
In fact, calling them “drugs” is not at all accurate either.
Steroids, HGH, and anything else that comes down the pike later are/will be hormones.
Hormones don’t just disappear. They are huge molecules that alter tissue and blood chemistry in a way that currently cannot be made undetectable by the proper testing methods.
Testing for these types substances is no different than testing for insulin levels, T3 and T4 levels, HIV antibodies, or any other proteinaceous blood factor.
There are no hormones/proteins/amino acids that cannot be separated out from the blood in a gas chromatograph or electrophoretic gel.
None.
Consult your nearest university’s molecular biology department and they’ll tell you the same thing.
Righteous Bubba–
Thanks for the snark, but the fact remains that you could not be more wrong.
Molecules that large cannot be present, let alone efficacious, without leaving evidence as themselves or as by-products from their metabolism in the blood.
I don’t know what else can be said to make your feeble lay mind understand.
I don’t know what else can be said to make your feeble lay mind understand.
Golly thanks. I was under the impression that sports all over the world were engaging all kinds of labs to catch people, sometimes failing and sometimes succeeding, but evidently you are 100% perfect at knowing both when the drugs – heh – are present and also at knowing when the unknowns are there.
There’s a fortune to be made, Dr. Science.
show them video and photographs of Lyle Alzado and Ken Caminiti just before each of them died of cancer, likely induced by steroid use
Caminiti died of a drug overdose that was initially reported as a heart attack.
Baseball’s obligation to athletes in terms of doping should be this: show them video and photographs of Lyle Alzado and Ken Caminiti just before each of them died of cancer, likely induced by steroid use.
Caminiti died of a drug overdose that was initially reported as a heart attack.
And why did I just “post” this little factoid with links and everything and yet nothing happened? Am I cursed?
Righteous Bubba–
Name one competitive body that is allowed to test the blood of its competitors.
Not MLB, not the NFL, not the Premiership, not the Olympic committee, not your “labs all over the world.”
Not one.
They are all limited to urine testing which is so totally unreliable as to be worthless at those levels of competition.
Start testing the blood and you will miss no cheaters.
Your feeble lay mind fails again.
Righteous Bubba said,
December 14, 2007 at 2:51
You are always only testing for the last dope.
Right. The expert cheaters will always win. The inexpert cheaters let you pretend your sport is clean.
I fall in different places on the doping question: today I’ll err on the side of health. These guys are workers and workers should not have to destroy themselves to make a buck, healthy though those bucks are.
I gotta disagree with this. These guys, like say A-Rod, have access to expert medical and legal opinions, have agents (who nominally are supposed to protect them from some of this), and have a union and clout.
These aren’t factory workers. If they’re destroying their lives, they’re doing in with full knowledge of the consequences. It’s an informed risk, no different than, say, a contractor in Iraq who makes $150,000 driving a truck.
Name one competitive body that is allowed to test the blood of its competitors.
First article Googled, from the year 2000, with the exotic search string of “blood test” + sports.
http://www.cbc.ca/sports/story/2000/12/07/doping001207.html
You are wrong. I believe by your rules this means you have a feeble lay mind.
I gotta disagree with this. These guys, like say A-Rod, have access to expert medical and legal opinions
If it was only millionaires we were talking about I’d be less on the side of the, uh, angels (?) but there are a lot of folks out there trying to become one of them there rich guys, and it’s really the shlubs I was thinking about as opposed to people like Barry Bonds.
Righteous Bubba–
You got me!
After searching “blood testing” and Olympics, Major League Baseball, National Football League, Tour de France, National Basketball Association, National Hockey League and World Anti-Doping Agency I concluded that no major governing authority had the right to test its’ athletes’ blood.
But you’re right. An obscure swimming authority with exactly zero influence on the World Championships or Olympics did test blood at one point.
Ticky-tack, but correct nonetheless.
Allow me to correct: there is not one significant athletic governing body that is allowed to test blood.
Better?
These guys are workers and workers should not have to destroy themselves to make a buck, healthy though those bucks are.
Excellect point, Mr. Bubba. Furthermore, although I despise the usual “Think of the childrens!!!!1!!!” hysteria, I keep seeing reports that many, many college and even high school athletes are misusing steroids because they’ve been convinced that everybody else is doing it, and therefore they have no hope of achieving their slim, desperate chance at a professional sports career without doping. Telling people too young to legally drink that they have a choice between cutting years off their lives in a future they can barely imagine, and poisoning their bodies in hope of a quick performance boost immediately, is as dishonest and un-American as telling the same kids that “Islamofascism” will destroy everything they love if they don’t sign up for the armed forces immediately. And of course it’s the same kids, the ones who are a little too good & a little too smart to give up on their own futures, but who are too poor to assume that their parents’ financial assistance can cushion their way through college and into a secure career afterwards, who fall for the steroids marketeers and the recruiting tools.
RB–
I stand corrected again
Apparently they did test swimmers’ blood in the Sydney Olympics, though they tested no other competitors.
I bow to your search engine prowess.
One may also note the Tour de France has had blood test scandals this year. Major I’d say.
Yup, sports are entertainment and some people take ’em way too seriously; but I think there are reasons. Its not just a lack of imagination that prompts many politicians to use sports analogies. Sports offer an easy-to-grasp model for law and ethics precisely because they don’t touch on matters of life and death, where ethical reasoning is always murkiest.
I’m not sure which is the case: that we created sports to have little utopian moral universes where the rules are always clear and possible to follow, or if we project our most absolutist moral reasoning onto sports because we can do so without caring too much about the consequences.
In any case, its not hard to see why Mencken– a man concerned with social justice and opposed to the predations of runaway capitalism– might also get a wee bit exercised about those who go beyond the rules (or who fall back on arguments about the ends justifying the means) in baseball. I’d be more sympathetic if he’d pick a real sport like football to get all knotted up about.
The IOC performed urine and blood tests at Turin in 2006.
I’m telling you, these baseball threads really bring out the uncouth!
What’s this gots to do with me?
My simple lay mind was too busy trying to get layed to pay attention to all that egghead gobelty-gook.
So that one guy is right, but man is he vindictive about it. And he’s tenacious like a 9/11 Truther.
It seems like taking blood is one of those taboo things. Maybe its the whole ‘vampire’ thing. But yes, it would be foolproof, but very difficult to actually get implemented.
I dunno, Anne, I’m uncomfortable with your plaintive cry.
These kids are kids, sure, but they are not stupid or uninformed. They KNOW there are risks with using these drugs. They may not be able to make the same kind of informed decision an adult can make, but the world is a real place with land mines and barbed wire to be navigated by all occupants.
They might look at military superstars like Colin Powell and Wesley Clark and join up and become a lifer and survive getting wounded and come out as somebody we admire.
They might look at Billie Joe Armstrong and smoke pot and write songs and learn to play the guitar and become a rock legend.
They might just discover that smoking crank is a pretty fun thing to do and discover they can make a living stealing cars.
Or, they might look at professional athletes and think that using steroids and learning their craft might get them into college, and beyond that just maybe they might become 8 figure superstars.
You’re a kid. You pick a path. You pursue it. It might be high energy physics, it might be military, it might be rocknroll, it might be athletics.
Hell, it might be commodities trading. What do you want from these kids?
They’re gonna chase their dreams, or they’re gonna coast, but you do NOT get to pick for them…
mikey
I can never keep my aliases straight.
RB–
Yup.
Forgot about the EPO sports–swimming, cycling, marathoning.
Can’t determine blood packing without blood.
Feeling a little stupid over here.
Still, I think we can agree that most sports are not allowed to test their competitors’ blood, and those EPO sports are allowed to test blood because altering the blood itself is the main way to cheat.
A list of sports organizations that have accepted the World Anti-Doping Agency’s Code. The list is not short. The Code includes blood sampling as part of its testing procedure.
Hell, it might be commodities trading. What do you want from these kids?
They’re gonna chase their dreams, or they’re gonna coast, but you do NOT get to pick for them…
True, Mikey. But I distrust the wink-wink, whachagonnado, we-all-die-someday attitude that encourages kids to believe that shooting up some kind of “magic vitamins” is their only chance of succeeding in professional sports, because “everybody knows” that “everybody (else) is doing it”. I don’t have a perfect instant cure, and I doubt that retroactively attempting to jail or fine some random selection of pro athletes who weren’t smart enough or subtle enough or lucky enough to resist Instant Win-in-a-Vial will do anything to keep future kids from making their own choices, however bad or deadly.
Maybe we need the sports-world equivalent of the much-touted South African Reconciliation Councils: We look at whatever evidence we can dig out, starting with Mitchell’s report, and agree that bad shit went on, that people innocently or not made bad decisions, that events were spoilt and people were hurt and a lot of records are always going to have asterisks appended to them. And then, once all the stories are told and the spiderwebs of lies & half-truths & thimblejiggery have been untangled as far as they can be, we agree that this crap was wrong… and that, going forward, everyone will agree that Magic Vitamins (whatever next year’s version might be) are not how we want our winners to succeed. Because, yeah, there will always be a bright young chemist with a new undetectable substance that’s “guaranteed”, and there will always be shifty or desperate or short-sighted athletes who believe that “winning isn’t everything, it’s the only thing”. But, just as our politics have become heinously debased over the last couple of decades, our “sports entertainment” has chased the lowest acceptable ethical standards in a race for the bottom, and if we aren’t willing to stop and say ENOUGH, then when is the right time and who are the right people to do so?
These kids are kids, sure, but they are not stupid or uninformed.
It’s different when it’s your job and you have to do X to stay employed. They’re not necessarily kids either. Wal-Mart doesn’t get to feed their employees crank to make ’em go and neither should some single A club somewhere.
Well, if nothing else I think we can all agree that the San Francisco Giants are an evil, evil team full of evil, evil men.
And thanks to Mikey, fifty or so posts back, for bringing up Juan Marichal. If we forget Juan Marichal, we are doomed to relive him.
I’m feeling thirsty.
I wasn’t trying to fuck with Marichal. That was just spin.
Hee hee..
JR
It is, I think, something that can make a good player great and a great player God-like.
So wait a minute, are you saying it was possible for Eric Gagne to have been WORSE? Holy CRAP.
Eric Gagne was a killer w/ the Dodgers, they just used him up is all.
Biggest point: Other athletes feel that in in order to keep up, put food on their family, etc., they too must take PEDs, even if they ordinarily wouldn’t. It’s simply unfair.
W00t! (As the kids certainly do not say any more, and what planet does Surber inhabit?)
That was one righteous column. And not just because I live a mere bridge away from the center of all that stuff, although the takedown of the Giants fanboysandgrlz was so good as almost to distract from the devastation of Bonds and all that he stands for.
M Bouffant kind of has it. You can’t allow them because you are forcing everyone to take them. This would be an abusive workplace. And I denounce any choad that declares “that is their choice.” We have workplace regulations in our country- you could make the same arguments against sweatshop regs- they just don’t fly. You cannot have a workplace that creates an environment that is essentially abusive. I mean, except the NFL. (don’t get me started)
Just for the record, I’m with Mikey (if they’d had the juice back in the late 50s, Mickey Mantle would’ve shot as much of it as he could get and hit about 900 homers in the process) and Tomemos (HTML is a total Buckner type: it’s not that he doesn’t put any runs on the board—it’s that he doesn’t walk and grounds into double plays constantly, meaning he wastes so many outs that it all but negates his production. He’s the diametric opposite of Roy Edroso, who writes like Joe Morgan played. The Editors is Eric Davis, Billmon was Lou Gehrig. Anyone else?).
HTML –
First – I know that you wrote most of this before the Mitchell Report came out, but you did post as a response to the Mitchell Report.
So my question is, who in their right mind responds to the Mitchell Report, which lists dozens of basebplayers associated with performance enhancing drugs (and implies that that’s just the tip of the iceberg) … by excoriating one single player who has been hammered in the press (and by HTML) constantly for the past few years?
Seriously, if we learn anything from the Mitchell Report, it’s how widespread and possibly systemic PED use is in baseball. Its contents seem to hardly the basis to go on a tirade that Barry Bonds is the biggest scumbag ever, a “sociopath” who “wanted the records because he thought he was owed” — which to all astute mind-readers makes him orders of magnitude worse than the “mere pikers at the art of acquiring what is undeserved” like McGwire and Sosa.
Anybody else?
Bob Somerby is Minnie Minoso.
In any case, its not hard to see why Mencken– a man concerned with social justice and opposed to the predations of runaway capitalism– might also get a wee bit exercised about those who go beyond the rules (or who fall back on arguments about the ends justifying the means) in baseball.
But he’s not “exercised about those who go beyond the rules” … he’s obsessed with ONE GUY who did. It’s classic conspiracy theory stuff — there’s always some archvillain or tiny group of archvillains who are the cause of a problem (when in fact it’s a systemic problem and ought to be understood that way).
This line:
It’s like hearing that Carey Roberts won the Boston Marathon or that Daffyd ab Hugh competes in Iron Man contests or that Ben Shapiro has laid more women than Peter North
Was really, really funny though.
M Bouffant kind of has it. You can’t allow them because you are forcing everyone to take them.
Yet another reason why the Randroids love the more flagrant cheaters. The coercive structure built by Bonds, et al, means that every poor Latin American who wouldn’t have shoes if it weren’t for baseball has to juice just to keep parity. IOW, the ubermenschen “achieves” and the undermenschen suffers — just as social Darwinism dictates.
by excoriating one single player who has been hammered in the press (and by HTML) constantly for the past few years?
I should have thought it was obvious. Bonds still has defenders. None of the other cheaters do. Also, Bonds stole the most important records. Clemens comes close in flagrancy, but to match Bonds perfectly, he would have had to top Cy Young’s record for career wins, and of course he didn’t.
And further adding to what PP said:
One reason glibertarians support cheaters is that they want all PEDs legalized. Well, I do too, but the exception has to be in professional sports for workplace safety concerns (no one being forced to dope to keep parity and therefore, their jobs) and for consumer fraud concerns. (Once he’s safely retired, Barry Bonds should legally be able to take all the cream and clear he wants, and even charge fans like DA for the privilege of joining in the ritual.)
But, yes, I said consumer fraud. People buy tickets to see a game that is fair, not for something more akin to professional wrestling in its fakery. The cheaters defrauded the fans, and I would support a class action suit against baseball ownership to recoup some percentage of ticket sales from, let us say, ’98 up.
That an unprecedented spike in power came when Bonds was 36 years old isn’t unique in the annals of baseball: Why, Lee Lacy also had a late-career power spike! Lee Lacy, for God’s sake.
Lee Lacy was totally coked up. There’s your late-career power spike.
Perhaps the American League could institute a designated juicer.
I should have thought it was obvious.
Yeah. By the same token, whenever writing a 3,000-word article about Abu Ghraib, it’s important to spend 2,990 of them on Lyndie England.
Bad analogy. Lemme try for something better. It’s like discussing war crimes in Vietnam and concentrating on Lieutenant Calley.
BTW, if it vexes you that your idol is a symbol — his name has become a cultural shorthand for all that is wrong with baseball — then you have only one person to blame.
And to extend the analogy above: Calley became a symbol not just for what he did, but because his case was where awful people who actually approved of what he did, chose to make their stand. People like Nixon and Colin Powell tried to cover Calley’s ass — the more his crime came to light, the more recalcitrant his defenders got. And that part is exactly like the Bonds situation. Nobody defends McGwire and Palmeiro; the Dead-enders all gather around Bonds. So I’m just trying to do my own little part in making that morally abominable Last Stand — to mix historical metaphors — end up like Custer’s.
Yet, HTML, you forgive McGwire and Sosa, who we all know juiced first. Bonds was, in effect, one of those who followed peer pressure into a bad decision.
As for making the cut-off at 98, ummmmm, again, McGwire and Sosa?
You come off a lot more upset by Bonds than by PED use.
Where have I forgiven anyone? McGwire sucks and is a cheater. So is Sosa. Yet no one defends them, and there’s not a rich history of “contrarian” cheering sections in their respective corners. So most of my heat is reserved for the Dead-enders and *their* Precious.
*their* Precious.
I recently gave a presentation for a bunch of people from across the country and used the word “documentses”.
You just suggested 98 as a cut-off, HTML. As in after McGwire and Sosa made the juice the thing to do. And in your original piece you made quite clear your unquenchable hatred for Bonds is magnitudes stronger than whatever you feel for M&S. Yet they, McGwire as part of the bash brothers especially, are the ones who popularized the juice and forced so many others to at least consider it. By the time Bonds was unquestionably juicing it’d been part of baseball’s culture for at least half a decade.
I’m not defending Bonds so much as saying you seem to be severely overreacting. We all care about whatever we care about, and it’s not my place to judge that, but you’ve made this personal.
Barry Bonds did not mean to run over your dog, HTML, let go of the anger.
No, ’98 as in nullifying what McGwire and Sosa did, and giving the record back to Roger Maris.
St. Barry was *not* coerced into keeping his job, like the FP Santangelos or Larry Bigbies or whomever named as juicers in the report. He was a HOFer already. He juiced truly out of choice because he was a jealous, bitter shit, who wasn’t content with being regarded as the best all-around hitter of his generation.
Barry Bonds did not mean to run over your dog, HTML, let go of the anger.
To the extent that this *is* personal, which you greatly exaggerate, it’s in the fact that Bonds’s defenders *did* run over my dog, repeatedly. Then squalled their tires on the carcass. Then laughed about it and threw a pile of dogshit on my doorstep.
The one place I really part company with HTML is when he dips into Bonds’ motivation: “Bonds wanted the records because he thought he was owed,” and subsequent lines. It’s an attractive theory, and it might be true, but I’m just suspicious of any claim to get inside someone’s head like that.
There are two reasons Bonds gets so much hate: First, he’s an ass to sports reporters, so they are naturally glad to publicize any stupid, mean, or asinine thing he does or says. Second, his cheating looked so damn obvious. He played major league ball for ten years at a listed 185-190 lbs., then jumped to 206. Yeah, maybe extra weights and diet change could do that. Three, four years later and he’s added another 22 lbs., all muscle. That just doesn’t happen to men in their mid- to late 30’s.
Righteous Bubba said,
December 14, 2007 at 3:39
If it was only millionaires we were talking about I’d be less on the side of the, uh, angels (?) but there are a lot of folks out there trying to become one of them there rich guys, and it’s really the shlubs I was thinking about as opposed to people like Barry Bonds.
Which is why I think steroids should be legalized and openly used.
Actually, my longtime theory as to Bonds’s motivation was corroborated by the Game of Shadows book.
Bad analogy. Lemme try for something better. It’s like discussing war crimes in Vietnam and concentrating on Lieutenant Calley.
Whatever floats your boat. I don’t see a big difference in analogizing Bonds to (bad apple) England or (bad apple) Calley.
The point being, everybody knows about Mai Lai and next to nobody knows about the military establishment’s role in covering it up. It has been successfully repackaged as an aberrational atrocity, the work of a couple “bad apples”.
If you want to do the same thing with steroids in baseball, which you claim to care deeply about, by participating so loudly in the “bad-apple-ization” of Barry Bonds, go right ahead.
Your efforts do nothing to help people to understand the systemic nature of the PED problem, and in fact hinder such understanding by focusing so narrowly on just one cheater and one alone, but never mind. Keep it up.
which you claim to care deeply about, by participating so loudly in the “bad-apple-ization” of Barry Bonds, go right ahead.
Oooh. Since you’re gonna go *there* — attributing bad faith — then allow me to retort. It’s because *you* have so much personally invested in Bonds that you defend his every depravity — and, by extention, all other cheaters so as to remain consistent and somewhat mask your true interest — that I have to concentrate on Bonds. Stop your Dead-enders’ crusade for St. Barry, and I’ll argue the more general point.
Also this:
Clemens comes close in flagrancy, but to match Bonds perfectly, he would have had to top Cy Young’s record for career wins, and of course he didn’t.
This just doesn’t make any sense. You’re saying that Bonds is *more culpable* for steroid use than Clemens (or any other ballplayer I guess) because he broke some records? Huh?
I mean, I get that you’re more pissed off at Bonds than everyone else because he “taints” the HR records he holds. But it’s a giant leap to accuse him of being more “flagrant” in his cheating than Clemens, because by an accident of birth one was born in an era when it was possible to challenge HR records and the other at a time when it was impossible to get anywhere near the starts to challenge the pitching wins record.
That’s just silly and arbitrary.
To be honest, one of the main reasons for my “crusade” for “St. Barry” is that so often his detractors demand that we Giants fans disavow any thrills we got watching him hit homers into the Bay, loudly proclaim his villainy at every opportunity and generally mope around depressed that ‘we wuz robbed’ by rooting for him and the Giants in the first place.
And the fact is, I don’t feel that way. I mean, I could say I do, but I’d be lying. I get why you hate him as a cheater. I don’t like that he did what he did with the ‘roiding, either. But I am afraid that my very soul does not scream out for his traitorous blood 24/7, and in fact I still smile broadly when I think of him hitting No. 71 or No. 757.
Sorry, guess I’m just a Dead-Ender scumbag at heart.
If it was only millionaires we were talking about I’d be less on the side of the, uh, angels (?) but there are a lot of folks out there trying to become one of them there rich guys, and it’s really the shlubs I was thinking about as opposed to people like Barry Bonds.
Which is why I think steroids should be legalized and openly used.
I don’t see that this makes for a healthy workplace. Most athletes are not going to be heroes and I don’t buy that allowing people to destroy themselves for wish-fulfillment is a good thing to enshrine in a rulebook.
98… durh. Brainfart on my part. Doy.
I’d keep going but other duties demand my attention.
Just a couple of minor niggles…
“Will Clark, Jeffrey Leonard, Barry Bonds — hell, even Dave Fucking Kingman had his admirers in San Fran.”
Please…. San Fran? Tres Georgetown… Very bad lamer non-west cost talk. Kind of like calling LA the Big Orange… definitely bad form. I’m sure there is an equivalent usage in your hometown that marks the unobservant transplant.**** SF, pronounced esss effff, or simply The City, is more authentic local parlance.
Your short list, while sprinkled with greatness, Wiiiiillll the Shrill as #1 is highly appropriate and Jeff Leonard was the best at whatever it was he did, ran into fences better than any player I saw, kind of a National League Freddy Lynn in that category, also very good at holding up his mitt to indicate he had made a catch, one of the greatest glowerers ever to grace Candlestick Park, (quite a pantheon of pinched brows and hooded eyes down the years in Giants baseball history), ultra rug or live grass, is OK, but… you left off lots of guys like er, Montefusco, or Kevin Mitchell, though he turned into a kind of jolly gangster black Santa in his later years, and the ‘God Squad’ pitching staff, the bizarre tragedies of Dave Novicky & Roger Metzger, Brett “Butt” Butler, or one of my personal favorites from the old days (a direct link to the ‘glory days’ of baseball…i.e. before Jackie Robinson) Mr. Alvin Dark;
“Latin American ballplayers have come a long way since the days when a manager could issue an edict, as the Giants’ Alvin Dark did in 1964, prohibiting players from speaking Spanish in the clubhouse. ”
You never even mentioned my personal #1 Giant to hate, the man most likely to be picked off on first base in the late innings of a close game, Jack Clark. To say nothing of the first BB, Bobby the father, a very complex, errrr… difficult, personality. Truly Giants fan have supped at a very mixed grill when it comes to the fine dining experience that should be a hometown’s birthright… and now, sigh, the reign of Barry…*
The Red Sox fans among us wear their frustration as a badge of courage. Every year at playoff time its like the annual Shriner’s parade with a float for the goat and The Babe’s Picture and Buckners legs… almost as iconic as Lexington Green or Paul Revere’s ride. A national treasure trove of baseball disappointment. The Yankees, the Cubs, the Dodgers, even the Twins, all have aspects of life that their fandom, shall we say, illuminates. We Giants fans must suffer a very different fate. Our shame is a private stain. The fandom that dare not speak it’s name. Our heroes, unlike the rest of the league, are tainted. Ego, hatred, bigotry is the burden of the Giants fan.**
Today the game of baseball is an entertainment for the populace owned by rich men as much as it was when it became the ‘national pastime,’ and the men who play it are subject to the whims of the owners now just as they were then. We are allowed and encouraged to observe this glorious public display of physical agility and prowess, but what we feel about it has little effect on how the enterprise is carried out. Barry Bonds, son of a baseball star, and like his own son, on the field picking up his Dad’s bats when he was a batboy, is a product of that system. Whatever choice he made was inside the context of an industry that only cares about your numbers, that ultimately only rewards results.***
I’m a grown up in LA, east side, almost Orange County,**** Dodger fan who moved to SF 30 years ago and loves live baseball. Could I continue to ‘hate’ my local team forever? For me I found out I couldn’t. Now I’m a Giants fan and I like to think of Willie Mays, Cepeda & McCovey, the Alou brothers, Johnnie LeMaster falling down after missing a fastball at the plate, Rick Ruschel throwing junk late, Jose Uribe & Robbie Thompson turning it, Kevin Mitchell barehand or banging line drives off the chainlink fence in left or the concrete parking lot out there where the kids used to get raspberries fighting over home runs, or home runs into the water at the new yard, even the ones Barry hits. Like a fan of any team the list goes on and on and on. We’re not really bad HTML, we’re just misunderstood OK?
I’m not at all a fan of Barry Bonds. He’s a well documented jerk. You are perfectly justified in having the strong opinion about him that you do and I generally concur, but you have tarred the Giants fan with a wide brush in this piece and I believe you have hamstringed your own argument by doing so. I would like to offer up a name for the problem that afflicts you, BDS, Bonds Derangement Syndrome. I think your hatred of Bonds maybe affecting your emotion ‘governor.’ I feel the same way about the entire Yankee organization, just can’t seem to have a civil discussion about that fuckin’ team…
…………………………………………………………………
*of course he’s a prick, you think we don’t know it? It is our house he’s pissing in after all…
**Though the Red Sox, I believe, do have their own checkered history in the race department…
***me, I think the cream was tainted along with the flaxseed oil
****the OC… really, really lame, like calling Westchester County the WC… I’m serious! Don’t do it. Cut that crap now!
And voila:
I still smile broadly when I think of him hitting No. 71 or No. 757.
Yes, with all the sophistry stripped away, that’s exactly what it boils down to. As I said above, the fans of other teams with renowned cheaters have no problem disowning their villains. Only SF Giants fans circle the wagons around their false idol: “You will not take the Precious from us!!!”
So what that he cheated. So what that his cheating put marginal players’ health at risk by coercing them to juice to keep parity. So what that he fucked Hank Aaron, by far his moral and physical superior. So what that he made a mockery of the sport you purport to love. So what that he has until recently evaded all justice. The important thing is that he’s *your* Barry, and nothing can take him away!
In more innocent times, among a less nihilist fan base, the revelation that a star cheated stung: ‘say it ain’t so!’ But it was so, hearts were broken, the villain was disowned, and the team reaped a karmic reward. Nowadays, hearts refuse to be broken because it’s all about selfishness and tribalism; ‘say it ain’t so’ becomes ‘we’ll fight to the death denying that it’s so, Mr. Baseball God’ with a wink and a secret handshake. Pathetic.
RETARDO,
I’m reading the whole friggin’ report. It’s not a bad piece of work (I’m at page 20).
Oh, and I also told James in ’02 I had my suspicions about Sir Roger Clemens. Again, my position was ridiculed.
I read Les’s piece. And I was certain, CERTAIN that Mencken would slow down. Back off a little. Recognize what Les was saying. That this team was my childhood, my youth, was the team of mays and mcovey and cepeda, the team I rooted for and loved and felt as one with, in my pajamas at night, long before I ever had to do ugly things and become something I loathed.
I thought, yeah, Les, says it clearly, and HTML will GET that there’s both sides, that we can love something without, or even before, we fully understand it. We can be raised as baseball partisans, and it doesn’t make us complicit, it makes us the same as him.
Fans.
And, sadly, Mencken didn’t back down. He won’t admit that he is us, that the love of the game is the same no matter what team you cheer for, and the heroes are your heroes, and it doesn’t require any kind of evil at all to be who you are, and to root for the team you were raised to root for.
And that very lack of imagination, Mencken, that very inability to understand what we’re saying, when you are saying the same fucking thing, that selfish claim to righteous baseball fandom when we all just love what we were raised to love, that’s what sickens and offends me.
Have you opinions. Believe what you believe. But for christ’s sake, understand what makes us fans, and what we love, and are clinging to with all our might. And if you feel we are somehow criminal for loving the game and the team we were raised to love, you, not us, are the sad, tragic wasted angry little man.
Not us…
mikey
Is it really so much to ask that you Giants fans do what Cardinals, Cubs, Orioles, Rangers, etc, fans have done — let your idol fall?
Or are you entitled to a special standard just because your team sucks?
The whole point, mikey, is that, no, you are *not* like everyone else. You alone are Dead-enders.
And I wasn’t replying to Les, whose post I’m still digesting; I was replying to DA’s admission about his Precious.
Michael Humphreys — good for you to drop in. And of course it doesn’t surprise me that James’s first instinct matched that of so many Primates.
Remember the good ol days when people like us — just for stating the obvious, that these players were cheaters — were called racists, character assassins, serial smearers, etc etc; flamed to no end by the most pathetic sorts of fanboys imaginable? Yeah, well, now’s the time for Truth’s triumph over Error; paybacks are hell and I admit to some satisfaction at turning the other fist. I know you, Andy, JC, Backlasher, and kevin have got to share in the feeling of vindication, not to mention the sheer joy in knowing that the steroids-frauds will be denied historical glory they never deserved. Now we have to work on that asterisk, and restoring Aaron’s rightful place… it’ll be exactly like taking from Thomas Sowell to give to Dr. King. Restitution, baby!
Consensus *is* forming; the Dead-enders are more demoralized by the day; the cheaters’ reputations weather into evermore unrecognizable rubble. Baseball will never be completely clean, but the events of the past few months go a long way to making it better for everyone.
Today the game of baseball is an entertainment for the populace owned by rich men as much as it was when it became the ‘national pastime,’ and the men who play it are subject to the whims of the owners now just as they were then.
Correct up to the comma, wrong thereafter.
Mencken – I’ve admitted many times in the past that I’m biased towards the Giants and Bonds … it’s not exactly an “admission”.
And look – put the asterisk on if you want to. Have the fucking balls to write a steroid-free record book of baseball that eliminates all the MVPs, Cy Youngs and World Series champs of the “tainted” years. Do THAT work instead of constantly complaining that “they” (the Dead-Enders or whatever) won’t allow the truth to be told.
Nobody’s stopping you from writing your pure-as-the-driven-snow fan’s history of baseball, except your own laziness.
How so slip? Workers control the means of production? You believe that the players are the controlling factor in how the game of baseball is run? If they don’t like what the owners are doing they can just quit and go to another team? What dreamworld do you live in where the workers, cause that’s what they are, extremely well paid contract workers, control the industry. After you start getting a steady diet of American Gladiator and Dancing With The Neighbors in January because the Writer’s Union is in the process of being destroyed tell me how the workers run things. The players make decisions based on the economic reality that they are faced with. They get huge contracts if they put up huge numbers. The owners decide, through bidding, selling, back door deals, whatever, how much these guys are worth. The fans are along for the ride with their sense of ownership of the game and its players constantly stoked by the public relations mechanisms of the sports-media industrial complex. Do you think because players make a lot of money they are free to do what they want regarding their job? The small amount of leverage that they have only comes when the owners, highly competitive businessmen after all, get greedy and fight amongst themselves for the best players and let the coin purse slip. I’m old enough to remember when Sandy Koufax and Don Drysdale held out for raises in 1966 by refusing to resign their automatically renewed contracts. That’s why these guys make good money today and they deserve every penny they can get.
Les,
I took “owned by rich men as much as it was when it became the national pastime” to go back further than 1966. I too remember Koufax and Drysdale, Flood and Messersmith.
Workers control the means of production? Is that what Curt Flood was aiming for?
I’m simply saying that the Players Union, free agency and agent representation changed things for the better.
Players do not face the whims of owners today just as they did back in the time of Chas. Comiskey. If Curt Flood was around, he’d tell you the same…
So be it.
Don’t mean nothing.
Don’t change nothing.
I will take what I believe is, for me, the appropriate amount of pleasure from baseball.
I will be happy and excited when the giants are in the race, or, maybe again someday, the postseason.
But my world won’t fall apart when they lose. It’s the games and the very partisanship under fire here that I enjoy. Hell, babe, I CAME to root. I’m a fan. A Giants fan.
Fall 2002 was fun, and as part of this fan’s baseball life, it was very special. And Bonds is one of the things that made it special.
Of course I’ll give him a pass. He hasn’t done anything to me…
mikey
[…] course G.W. Bush’s baseball equivalent has to be Barry Bonds (one stole elections, the other stole hitting records), not, as the HT guy has it, A. J. Pierzynski (though P. can almost match Bonds in […]