"I'd like to thank God for human growth hormone...."
Barry Bonds isn't the first baseball player to use performance enhancers. Babe Ruth did it, some 70 or so years ago.
I have said that the Babe was also guilty, but that his substances of choice were beer and hot dogs. And maybe a healthy shot of bicarbonate soda to settle his tummy. Don't laugh -- it worked wonders. And it was legal.
The revelation, in a new book called "Game of Shadows", that Bonds used an array of performance-enhancing drugs for five seasons beginning in 1998 was kind of like finding out, as an adult, that Santa Claus never really existed.
Next we'll be told that Jared didn't really lose all that weight by eating Subway sandwiches.
Barry Bonds, pre-enhancers, and Barry Bonds, post-enhancers, looks like the comparison of David Banner and the Incredible Hulk. So forgive me if I stay firmly planted to my chair as write this.
I don't want to get into Bonds' medicine cabinet, because the list of what he used reads like a word search that employees of the Food and Drug Administration do in their spare time. Some of the stuff wasn't even meant for human consumption. And they have jazzy nicknames like "the cream" and "the clear" and "Mexican beans." Did the last one make him gassy?
Could explain some of the bloating.
I am bittersweet about this "revelation" in the book written by two San Francisco Chronicle reporters. On the one hand, I am happy that Bonds is finally, it appears, being unmasked as the fraud that he is. But another side of me weeps, because never can we again look at powerful homerun hitters in quite the same way. You wonder how many of these gaudy homerun figures are spurious. Clearly, Bonds' are -- but we pretty much knew that already. How much human growth hormone would he have needed to smack the dead balls of Ruth's era over the wall?
Predictably, Bonds was nonplussed by the book, the excerpts of which appear in the new Sports Illustrated.
"I won't even look at it. For what? There's no need to," Bonds said Tuesday at spring training in Scottsdale, Ariz.
Well, sure there's no need, because he already knows what he's done. Why would he need to read it?
The other melancholy aspect of this whole thing is there isn't even a "Say it ain't so, Joe" angle here, because Barry Bonds is not revered and lovable. So there is no shock factor -- no feeling of umbrage. No "How DARE they say that about Barry Bonds!" outrage.
Instead, it's "So how did the the United States do in the World Baseball Classic?"
Yes, even that is more exciting to talk about.
Quibblers and fine-liners and Bonds apologists will point to the fact that baseball didn't ban performance-enhancing drugs until after the 2002 season.
"So he really wasn't doing anything illegal!," they'll crow.
Well, no, but it certainly wasn't right, either. It may only be illegal if you get caught -- or if they write a rule against it. But pumping your body full of foreign substances so you can bulk up and crush a baseball farther than someone who's not doing that isn't what folks are paying their hard-earned money to see. They want baseball players, not laboratory creations.
Barry Bonds has 708 homeruns. He is six away from tying Ruth for second place all-time, and 48 from surpassing Hank Aaron to lead the pack.
Now, if any record deserves an asterisk....
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