Both Fainaru-Wada and Williams portray Bonds as a miniature bully, whose character flaws were made worse by steroid use. Never truly loved by baseball in general, the book merely reinforced that image he managed to portray over two decades of professional baseball.

The authors of Game of Shadows claim that Bonds' jealousy of McGwire led him to begin steroid treatments. Bond told his closest associates, including his white girlfriend, that McGwire got the home run record because the establishment allowed him because of his skin pigmentation. In spite of his occasional use of the race card in private, Bonds had many close white friends, and was openly dating a white woman. Even his first wife was white; but this did not stop the bitterness that he felt toward McGwire. As far as Bonds was concerned, he was a better player than McGwire and far more deserving of the press that McGwire received.

It was 1998 that convinced Bonds that he needed to juice up himself if he was going to be a dominant home run star and overshadow all the others. Fainaru-Wada and Williams show the successful transformation as Bonds turned into the Frankenstein of baseball. No one could get him out and his numbers spoke for themselves. A .290 hitter with one homer for every 16 at bats before 1999, Bonds started to hit homers a twice the clip before he became involved in the performance-enhancing drug.

The drugs used also resulted in personality changes. One of the major points that the authors relay was that baseball suspected or knew what was occurring. The Giants knew that Bonds' personal trainer was involved in steroid dealing but they did nothing. When the Giants' own trainers warned the management that Bonds' personal trainers were possibly involved in illegal steroid dealing and demanded that they be banned from locker room, they were overruled.

Baseball's present drug policy came about due to the possibility of potential Congressional intervention in the sport. In 2002, Ken Caminiti confessed to Sports Illustrated that his 1996 MVP season was steroid-powered and laid the groundwork for the present situation. And there was more than enough suspicion that something was amiss. Home runs were flying out of the park at record pace and what was considered hallowed ground became the routine. Sammy Sosa and Mark McGwire twice bested Roger Maris' record in individual seasons. And three years after McGwire bested Maris' record, Bonds obliterated McGwire's record. For years, bad pitching and smaller stadiums were blamed, but one major reason for the home runs soaring out of the ballparks was that many ball players pumped themselves up through pharmacology.