good barry?

Ok, lets assume that Bonds is a liar (he probably is) and that for the last seven years his incredible performance can, at least partially, be attributed to pharmacological enhancement. So, I'm wondering, what's the problem with that?

As far as I can tell there are two major arguments in the war on Bonds. The first questions the long term health effects of steroid use while the second blanches at the way performance enhancing drugs tend to undermine baseball's particularly statistical form of ancestor worship. There should be a third argument - that using performance enhancing drugs is cheating - but Major League Baseball didn't institute any sort of realistic doping policy until 2004 when Bonds (a) posted his last season of extraordinary home run numbers and (b) didn't get caught.

I'm not sure I buy all of the finger wagging about the allegedly negative health effect of steroids when it comes to professional athletes. First off, I'm at least willing to listen to the (libertarian) folks who argue that people should be allowed to do whatever they want with their bodies and secondly, we are talking about professional athletes here. Just check out any group of (limping, drooling) old jocks to see the price in terms of future health we demand of our sports stars. Is it really reasonable to argue that we're concerned about athletes' health while we're simultaneously paying them mad bank to beat each others heads in?

What I'm really interested in, though, is this idea of statistical purity and the way it intersects with technology. I'm certainly aware of the role statistics plays in baseball, but I'm not sure that the idea of level playing field has ever been much more than a pleasant fiction. Hank Aaron (the home run record holder and the guy Bonds is now chasing) was born in 1934 - a year after Babe Ruth retired. Take a look at this timeline of medical advances and then try to make the argument that there is no way Aaron benefited from medical science in ways unavailable to Ruth. Aaron may have never needed a blood bank, but I have a hard time believing he never took an antibiotic. Athletes have always tried to scope out every angle of advantage, and I think that Barry Bonds is being criticized for simply being ahead of the curve. I mean, as far as I know, old timey baseball players didn't have access to these either.