What to do with Barry Bonds?
Sixteen years ago today, the ever-controversial Bonds became baseball's home run king. Some would prefer to shut him out entirely. But things are never that simple.
Not many baseball players, heck, athletes in general, can look back on their closing acts with fondness, even the best-of-the-best:
Wayne Gretzky, statistically, the single most dominant player hockey has ever seen and (for now) its all-time goal-scorer, put away, somewhat appropriately, just nine goals during the 1998/1999 season. He retired that spring.
Since his Masters win for the ages in 2019, Tiger Woods seems unlikely, try as he might, to recapture his previous form. His car accident in 2021 has had lasting repercussions on his game, both tactical and physical. He admitted this past April that his surgically reconstructed right leg will “never be the same,” as he struggles to make cuts and maneuver the course. It is a sad end for a man who is on golf’s Mount Rushmore and is, for many, the very best the sport has ever seen.
Babe Ruth, overweight and hampered by the years of blurry, booze-fuelled nights that had finally caught up with him, could hardly play during his final, abbreviated season with the Boston Braves in 1935 (save for the game where he went 4-4 with three homers - of course). Batting just .181, a liability in the field and constantly feuding with management, he retired abruptly after only 28 games.
It is what makes 2007, the final season of Barry Bonds’ career, such a fascinating outlier.
We’ve been conditioned not to expect much from ballplayers in their twilight era, even from those lucky enough, like Albert Pujols or Miguel Cabrera most recently, who have been able to dictate the terms of their curtain call.
But Bonds, in his age-43 season, unlike so many others before him, didn’t stumble towards the end.
He didn’t gracefully step aside to allow a young upstart to take his place.
He didn’t announce his pending retirement nine months ahead of time, only to be showered in gifts and faux-appreciation as he travelled from ballpark-to-ballpark.
No, instead, Bonds, the man who has more walks and more home runs than anyone else in NL/AL history, did what he always did, even as, for many, a giant asterisk had long been following him around: he played some damn impressive baseball.
He led all of MLB with 132 walks, 43 of them intentional and a .480 on-base-percentage. He struck out just 54 times. He was an All-Star for the fourteenth time.
And although his speed was long gone (he stole a minimum of 20 bases in 12 of his 22 seasons) he was still effective on the base paths.
He hit 28 home runs too, none of them bigger then the one he drilled into the bleachers at AT&T Park on August 7th, sixteen years ago today: it was the 756th of his career, which surpassed Hank Aaron for the most all-time. He would hit six more before the season’s end.
Yet, when the Giants decided not to offer him a new contract and he entered free agency that winter, nobody rang, nobody wrote and nobody cared (not even with a carrier pigeon!).
He would hang around on the periphery of the game for a couple years afterward, supposedly awaiting a call that never came.
And then, that was it.
A Ferrari, left to idle on the Bay Bridge, burning fuel.
He would never again play a major league game.
How does someone (myself) who only caught the end of Bonds’ career, reconcile with the complex beast that is his continued legacy?
Well, the honest answer is, they don’t. Not really.
I was eight years old when he played what would be his final game in the fall of 2007 and I’d like to think, foolishly, that I was plugged into all the controversy surrounding him at the time:
The accusations of late-career steroid use that, later proven to be true (albeit, accidentally, so he claimed) would come to mare his greatest accomplishments (that giant asterisk).
His various legal troubles stemming from his doping: the BALCO scandal, being indicted on four counts of perjury and one count of obstruction of justice, in addition to accusations of domestic abuse.
And according to Bonds himself, in an unsuccessful 2015 lawsuit, the collision by MLB’s owners that led to his blacklisting from the sport following the 2007 season.
But, of course, I didn’t really have a clue, maybe outside of what I gleaned from SportsCentre. And why would I?
What eight year old cares about who was or wasn’t using the cream and the clear?
What eight year old cares about a player’s general reputation both inside and outside the game? (For Bonds, it was someone who wasn’t just a cheater but also a total dick, to his teammates, fans and the media)
Here’s a guy that is just destroying baseballs like each and every one has offended him personally, as he launches them into Low-Earth Orbit - see, exhibit A-through-Z: his lone career home run at Yankee Stadium in June of 2002.
Steroids? Dude, I’m eight years old. I don’t even know what steroids are.
Like, that ball still hasn’t landed.
But that’s the great Bonds question, isn’t it?
For as many baseball dreams as he inspired, he took them away too.
Here’s something you may not know: Barry Bonds does exist, according to the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum at Cooperstown.
That may surprise you, given how it seems that the sport at large would prefer if he just disappeared but there is no hiding from history. If you like, you can view his record-setting home run ball, which after being purchased by a private collector, was prominently engraved with an asterisk before making its way behind glass.
The Hall of Fame proper though? The plaque room itself? Where the legends of the game, gathered together, seem to stand still, frozen in time? No. You won’t find Bonds there.
His ten-year eligibly period recently ended and although he garnered more-and-more support every voting cycle, he still fell short of induction.
He may one day get in, or maybe not, the controversy of his time in baseball, too great for too many voters to overcome, at least for now. His pure excellence on the diamond, be dammed.
But that’s just it - “for now” isn’t “forever”.
The great Joe Posnanski (who you can find over at the place to be,
) wrote about Bonds for his terrific book, The Baseball 100.His caveat though, was that the Barry-centric chapter was divided into two separate sections, those in support of Bonds, flaws and all, and those against him, finding a middle ground, up to the reader’s discretion.
And I’m not one to disagree with Mister Posnanski, a far more experienced writer on this subject than I, but I would argue, if I could be so bold, that such a middle ground isn’t as grey as it used to be.
I get it - for those who were there when it happened, baseball’s steroid scandal left deep scars that will probably never truly heal, their faith in the sport’s institution, shaken that deeply.
Even before the summer of 1998, when Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa captivated the nation as they chased down Roger Maris’ single-season home run record, there were noted suspicions about steroids and performance-enhancing drugs being prevalent throughout baseball, even after MLB added them to their banned substances list in 1991.
In 2010, McGwire admitted (and apologized) to using steroids throughout his playing career, including during that record-setting season in 1998, where he finished second in NL MVP voting and hit 70 homers (Maris’s mark of 61 still stood in the AL until Aaron Judge hit 62 last season).
McGwire claimed, however, that steroids never enhanced his performance, only assisted in recovery.
Sosa, who remains the only player in baseball history to hit 60 or more home runs in three separate seasons and has long been suspected of steroid use, has denied all accusations.
And then, you have Bonds.
Who, yes, used steroids during the back half of his career, as instead of aging gracefully into his mid-30s, he turned into a ball-mashing, history-making behemoth, far above his or anyone else’s career norm. There is no disputing that.
And the interesting thing, is that if you accept the commonly held belief that he only started using post-1998 - frustrated that he wasn’t being given his due credit in a McGwire/Sosa dominated media cycle - he was already one of the greatest players to ever step foot on a diamond.
Let’s say Barry Bonds made different choices. Let’s say he decided, at 33, after seven seasons in Pittsburgh and six in San Francisco, that it was time to retire, to move on, to try other things, instead of eventually developing some very questionable dietary habits.
He had, already:
411 home runs.
445 stolen bases.
A career OPS of .966 and a WAR of 99.6.
8 Gold Gloves. 7 Silver Sluggers. 3 MVP Awards.
That is just half of his career - but it is legendary all its own.
He was an excellent fielder, with a serviceable arm in left and unmatched plate discipline. He could hit for power, he had tremendous speed - he is just one of four players ever to have a 40-40 season, with 42 homers and 40 steals in 1996.
He was the five-tool player of five-tool players and his legacy, although he clearly felt otherwise, was secure.
Instead, he used. His ego, it seems, getting the best of him.
And because of that decision, he had, arguably, the greatest four-season offensive stretch of any player in baseball history. Some highlights:
From his age-36 to 39 seasons, 2001 to 2004, he slashed .349/.559/.809. He averaged 52 home runs over those four years. He won four straight MVPs.
In 2001, he hit a major-league record of 73 home runs in a single season. He had never even hit 50.
In 2003, he became the first (and remains the only) member of the 500/500 club.
In 2004, he got on-base sixty percent of the time, thanks to his 232 walks, 120 of which were intentional. Both were records, as was his .812 slugging percentage, which was the fourth-highest ever in a single season.
So when the dust finally settled, Bonds had left no doubt.
He used steroids. He cheated. And he became the most singularly dominant offensive force his sport had ever seen
And what did it get him? He hasn’t been elected to Cooperstown, he’s been more-or-less shunned from the game in retirement and with the exception of San Francisco, where the Giants retired his number in 2018, you won’t find much love for Barry.
But should we continue to prosecute him for that? To bar him from the plaque room and the immortality that comes with it? Out of what, spite?
As Larry David once reminded us, kinda-sorta, most everyone was juicing at the time but Bonds, already the best of the best and for all his talent, someone who was never publicly beloved relative to his skill and accomplishments, became the public face of everything that was supposedly wrong with baseball.
Everybody's doing it, I’m just levelling the playing field!
Perhaps I’m a little too cavalier in my attitude, I’ll admit that. But I find the dichotomy, on a base level, to be so interesting - between those that still insist that Bonds and so many others committed the ultimate baseball sin, next to gambling and shouldn’t be recognized for their achievements in any way.
And then, you have the other side of that coin with well, people like me.
The next generation of sports fans, who came of age after the height of MLB’s ‘Roid Rage or perhaps, were born well into the 2000s and are removed from it entirely as we navigate a shifting cultural landscape: where movie stars pretty openly use as they bulk up for roles, where pro sports, including baseball, broadcast incessant gambling ads on a loop and make sure to highlight betting odds during TV timeouts.
Transparent? Hypocritical? Sure. But it won’t last.
The way I see it, again, as someone who wasn’t born until 1999, is there is certain moral high ground baseball continues to take with players from the Steroid Era and others it would rather keep on the blacklist, even as cheating, in so many capacities, has been apart of the sport from the beginning.
There’s a terrific Seinfeld line, I think fits well here. From George, of course:
I’m a great quitter, it’s one of the few things I do well. I come from a long line of quitters. My father was a quitter, my grandfather was a quitter. I was raised to give up.
As a quick thought experiment, let’s do a little baseball Mad Libs here, reader. Replace “quitter” and “give up” with “cheat” and/or “cheater” as necessary.
Do you know what you have? You have baseball history. Cheaters.
Sign stealing, doctoring the ball long after such a practice was outlawed, drugs, throwing games and gambling. Corked bats and too much pine tar.
To gain the upper hand by whatever means necessary? That’s baseball.
Former Major Leaguer, John Milner testified in 1985 that Willie Mays had amphetamines in his locker in the early ‘70s (Mays, to his credit, was quoted as saying, “I could never have played like I did if I’d misused my body.”)
Pitcher Tom House, who played eight seasons in the big leagues from 1971 to 1978, admitted in 2005 that amphetamines and human growth hormone were widespread throughout baseball during his time in the Majors, himself, a prominent user.
And the legendary Nolan Ryan? He said something similar that same year:
"The late 70s. [That] was the first time I knew steroids had arrived. There was one player whose body changed so dramatically from the end of the season to the start of spring training, that I knew he was on the same stuff the NFL players were using then.”
There are users honoured in Cooperstown, there are cheaters, gamblers and morally repugnant men of various failings.
But I do believe, eventually, Barry Bonds will get into the Cooperstown plaque room, where, based on his on-field production, he should’ve been long ago. It won’t happen overnight, no. But it’ll happen.
Yes, he cheated. But to ostracize him (and the other well-known users, like Roger Clemens and Alex Rodriguez) specifically?
It seems so short-sighted, so purposefully trivial, so small. The greatest offensive player ever, shut out?
Where does it all leave us? Right where we started, I suppose. Just like Bonds himself.
Brilliant.
But never simple.