Barry Bonds hit his “714th” home run yesterday against the Oakland A’s.
On Fox, Tim McCarver was even more pathetically PC than usual. “And you’d think there’d be positive thoughts behind that home run, but there are almost as many negative ones.”
McCarver was talking about other people’s thoughts, not his own.
The only solace we can take from Bonds' case is that he (probably) isn't going to pass Hank Aaron. On the other hand, I half-wish Bonds would make a serious run at 755, because it would either force the phonies in the Commissioner's Office and Congress to confront Bonds' reported perjury and purchase (via barter) and use of illegal substances, or would humiliate them.
Bonds reportedly got his illegal drugs from Victor Conte, who ran the Bay Area Laboratory Co-Operative (BALCO) for free, in exchange for making celebrity endorsements for Conte’s worthless zinc-magnesium supplement, “ZMA.”
On the eve of the season, Jacob Luft quipped:
“Palmeiro, Sosa, McGwire, Bonds. That's your cast for George A. Romero's next B movie, Zombies from the Steroid Era.”When the book Game of Shadows : Barry Bonds, BALCO, and the Steroids Scandal that Rocked Professional Sports was published in March, it corroborated what any honest baseball fan by then already knew to be true. Bonds’ home run and slugging percentage records came when 15-year veteran had “bulked up” on steroids. Also, his batting average was up 80 points higher (.370) than his lifetime average.
Miami Herald sports columnist Greg Cote satirized Bonds thusly:
Bonds has denied the allegations in the book, denied the existence of the book itself, denied he has ever ingested anything into his body at any time, including oxygen, and also denied his name is Barry Bonds.When a baker's helper is caught committing crimes – including crimes involving illegal drugs – authorities arrest and prosecute him. Why is it that the authorities have consistently said they aren't interested in prosecuting players for using steroids? According to Game of Shadows authors Mark Fainaru-Wada and Lance Williams, Bonds also committed perjury by denying steroid use to a federal grand jury, as well as tax evasion by earning hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash for signing baseballs at memorabilia shows and not declaring the income to the IRS.
Oh, I just remembered – most of the laws that apply to you and me don't apply to professional athletes.
And yet, Pete Rose not only was prosecuted for income tax evasion, but went to prison for it. And unlike Bonds, Rose had nothing to show for his crimes. Rose was a compulsive gambler who lost millions of dollars betting on sports. The tax evasion charges were because he sometimes won on his bets, although he lost much more frequently. (Because the bets were illegal, Rose didn’t get to deduct his losses from his taxes.)
Article comments
1 - Matthew T. Sussman
To be fair, Fred McGriff bulked up on Tom Emanski's Defensive Drills videos.