Bonds' record is LEGiT, mutherfuckers!

[Martin_Hyde]

@intention

As someone who obviously knows a lot about the game,

Well, I’m not sure how much I know about the game since I stated that McGwire broke Maris’ record in 1996, not 1998 when he actually did it :smack:.

what is your opinion of the thesis that Bond’s elbow protector is a significant advantage? Seems to me that the fact that the League outlawed it means it must make a substantial difference, or they would have let all the players use it … is that your take as well?

It is an advantage, and MLB put stricter controls on them because they allowed players to do things they really shouldn’t be doing. By wearing extremely protective body armor, a batter can really crowd the plate. They can take away the “inside pitch” from the pitcher. Technically, if you are hit by a pitch in an area of your body that is in the strike zone it is not a free base, it’s a strike. However this is very rarely the way the umpires interpret it for a variety of reasons; one, there is significant discretion about whether or not a body part was in the strike zone–I don’t think there are any statistics available but from my observations as a fan, I notice that umpires lean more towards giving the base than they do calling a strike in situations like that. Most of the cases of the umpires not giving a free base that I have seen has been when a manager has complained to the umps and in one of the rare cases of this in baseball, the umps actually agree.

What body armor does is allow the player to crowd the plate with impunity. The pitcher can throw the ball anywhere in the strike zone, this is his right. If a player wishes to crowd that strike zone, they can, they may get hit by a fastball, though. If this happens, they will probably get a free base. What they’ll also get is some serious pain, especially if we’re talking about contact with an elbow. The real ideal solution is for umps to stop giving bases to guys who get hit by a body part that is in the strike zone, removing body armor is kind of a double edged sword. It does mean players will be less likely to take the risk of exposing themselves by heavily crowding the plate, but some guys are aggressive about crowding the plate no matter what–all this rule does for them is mean they’re more likely to get injured. Bonds actually isn’t being given a special consideration exclusively to himself, he’s actually got a “medical exemption” that allows him to continue wearing the body armor.

When I say it allows them to crowd the plate with impunity, I don’t mean to say there are no risks to crowding the plate just because you’re wearing body armor. Some pitchers will be aggressive in “claiming their half of the plate” which sometimes is expressed in the form of a ball in the ear. This does happen, however it also results in pitcher’s getting ejected from the ball game. In the case of a pitch incidentally hitting someone in the elbow because that guy was leaning so far in that he was actually covering the strike zone, the player is being hit directly because of where he was positioned, not because he pissed the pitcher off. Catcher Michael Barrett has even claimed that some guys will lean into a pitch if they had body armor on to snag a free base. I think that getting hit probably still hurts, even with body armor on, and there’s never a guarantee it will hit the body armor–so I wouldn’t do that to get a free base either way. But Michael Barrett is a major league catcher who sees what goes on at home plate better than anyone, so maybe this is actually more widespread than I would have thought; it could certainly be a large part of the banning.

The way baseball rules read, it really should be impossible for someone to get a base when they are doing this. To become a baserunner because of a hit by pitch, the hitter has to be hit by a pitched ball outside of the strike zone, they have to have attempted to avoid it, and they cannot have been attempting to swing at the ball. But, umpires have their discretion and unfortunately in my opinion they are too loose on giving out HBPs.

And do you have any idea of the rationale behind having different rules for different players? I mean, why let some guys use elbow protectors and not others? Is this selected enforcement the result of actions by the Player’s Association, or decided by the Baseball Commissioner, or the team owners, or how?

All the best,

w.

Like I said, Bonds and the other players who continue to wearing non-compliant armor (armor above a certain size) have medical exemptions.

[Martin_Hyde]

@Zoe

And there is nothing legit about a Baseball Hall of Fame that leaves out Roger Maris.

What reasoning do you have to support the idea that Maris deserves to be in the Hall? He just doesn’t have the numbers.

He had two really good years (1960 and 1961), two exceptional years, even. But the Baseball Hall of Fame isn’t supposed to reward you for two good seasons and another ten mediocre ones (many of those seasons not being full seasons, Maris missed a lot of ball games over the twelve seasons he was on MLB rosters–and was out of baseball by 33.)

He was a career .260 hitter (admittedly batting average isn’t a good representation of importance to a team, but that is a view only more recently adopted) his on base percentage was never really very good. His on base percentage was actually never even in the league top ten, and his OPS (OBP + slugging) was only in the top ten three of his twelve active seasons.

[monavis]

I fail to understand why there is such a fuss about any team record;Hank Aarons played on entirely different teams,had different pitchers,How he would do today or how Bonds would have done with the same players as Arrons can be disputed.

A single sport person like Woods, or a runner or skater may do better than a past athlete,but even they have different equiptment so the records could be questioned.

Monavis

[Hentor_the_Barbarian]

@monavis

Hank Aarons played on entirely different teams…

…with the same players as Arrons can be disputed.

There can be only one Hank Aaron.

[Jackmannii]

@Aeschines

Bonds is a dick and uses steroids.

“Used” might be more accurate, and this doesn’t take into account possible HgH usage, but otherwise spot on.

Hey, look - pennant races!

[Fiveyearlurker]

@Diomedes

I’d actually say the opposite. Bonds used steroids, legally, and never actually broke any of the rules.

The steroids that he has admitted to taking are illegal. It is not legal, by Federal law, to sell THG in the US. Does that change your opinion?

[Ludovic]

@dnooman

My Grandmother dislikes Tiger Woods. She says that he is using far more advanced equipment than the old school guys were, and therefore it’s not as impressive. I told her that he’s actually using an inferior golf ball because of his Nike endorsement, and he’s competing against guys with the exact same equipment (if not better).

I guess the Asian and the Black counteract each other…

[RickJay]

@Martin Hyde

The way baseball rules read, it really should be impossible for someone to get a base when they are doing this. To become a baserunner because of a hit by pitch, the hitter has to be hit by a pitched ball outside of the strike zone, they have to have attempted to avoid it, and they cannot have been attempting to swing at the ball. But, umpires have their discretion and unfortunately in my opinion they are too loose on giving out HBPs.

While I agree, sort of, it is worth noting that Bonds is not often hit by pitches. His career season high is just ten, which he’s done twice, including last year when he hit just 26 homers. This doesn’t place him anywhere near the top of the league among regular players; when he was hit ten times in 2003, Craig Biggio was hit 27 times, and the immortal Jason LaRue was hit 20 times. Jason Kendall, who in his career has played about 1300 fewer games and is arguably the most power-free regular player in the major leagues, has been hit by pitches more than twice as often. Bonds, for his career, has actually been plunked an unusually low number of times for a player playing as many games as he has. So far this year he has only been hit twice.

So if anyone’s gotten the impression he uses the elbow armor to lean in and get cheap HBPs, he doesn’t. Or he’s bad at it.

If you want to move the batters back, and rather obvious solution would be to move the batter’s box back a few inches and instruct the umpires to enforce it properly.

[storyteller0910]

I said it once in a different thread, and I’ll say it again: as far as I’m concerned, Bonds “accomplishment” is utterly meaningless. Hitting 756 home runs is, in and of itself, a completely arbitrary achievement. It has meaning only because we have collectively agreed that:

Under circumstances A, B, C, …, Y, Z, it is a big deal to hit 756 home runs.

(Where A = playing in major league ballparks; B = getting three strikes and four balls per at bat; C = facing major league quality pitchers; D through Y = all the other rules and guidelines of baseball, written and unwritten; and Z = not pumping yourself full of so much crap that you look like those dude who used to call the villain “Dookie” on the Gummi Bears TV show).

This collective agreement on the conditions under which a given achievement is impressive being the only thing that makes that achievement impressive, it becomes meaningless under other conditions - such as the ones under which Bonds hit his last couple hundred home runs. In sports and games, the ends can’t justify the means. Cure cancer, and then I’ll give you some leeway as to how you accomplish it. But succeeding at baseball is about nothing other than succeeding according to a certain set of rules. If you don’t follow them and then brag about your accomplishments, you might as well brag about winning thirty consecutive games of Monopoly by stealing a $500 from the bank every time you can get away with it. You “won,” sure, but in a way that means that “winning” no longer has any sort of meaning.

Oh. I know. It wasn’t against the rules of baseball at the time. Neither, I assume, was tracking the next night’s opposing pitcher down in the parking lot and pounding his throwing arm with a baseball bat, but that was still, I’m guessing, a frowned-upon tactic. Honestly, do we really need Rule 9, subsection d, codicil 112, which reads, Don’t be a fucking criminal?

Oh. I know. He didn’t know that “the cream” and “the clear” were performance enhancing drugs. You have every right to believe that a professional athlete who has made tens of millions of dollars on the ability of his body to perform complex actions consistently and precisely on demand put into his meal ticket substances about which he knew nothing, then failed to notice when his hats stopped fitting, his balls started shrinking, and he started to be able to hit the high notes in “O Mio Babbino Caro” from Gianni Schicchi. You can believe that. And if you do, OJ wants you to help him find the real killers, Pete Rose wants your vote for the Hall of Fame, and Dick Nixon’s dessicated corpse is dragging itself up from the pits of whatever miserable hell is its current residence to inform you that he was not a crook. Believe what you want. Worship at Bonds’ obscenely oversized feet until your knees are sore. I don’t understand why anyone would take enjoyment in such an artificial “moment” as Bonds’ #756, but I don’t understand the appeal of roller coasters or soccer either, and millions do, so live and let live.

Just stop expecting me to enjoy it. Concepts like “beyond a reasonable doubt” and “innocent until proven guilty” are for courts of law, where punishment is significant. When the court is “my brain” and the punishment is “I think Bonds sucks,” I need no such burden of proof. I need only to decide what is most likely: that an adult man grew into a cave troll at the age of 36, gaining unprecedented power at an age when most players start fading, by good fortune alone; or that the mountains of circumstantial evidence surrounding him most likely mean that he’s a big-headed cheater.

His record means nothing. It’s been built outside of what I consider to be “baseball.” It’s too bad that it’s gotten the attention that it has.

Let’s go A-Rod.

[denquixote]

@Martin Hyde

Baseball records have as much meaning as is assigned to them by the fans. Ask a man on the street who was the first ballplayer to hit 60 home runs in a season and it is my (totally unscientific) guess that a good chunk of people will say “Babe Ruth.” Ask them who the first to hit over 60 in a season is, and I think a far smaller percentage will be able to correctly answer “Roger Maris.” I wouldn’t be surprised if some answer Mark McGwire to that question.

Why is this the case? Is it because Maris was a bad guy? No, not at all. By most accounts Roger Maris was a good guy, not a huge name and not even a Hall of Famer, but a very nice guy who set a very impressive record. There was some sizable portion of the country who wanted Mickey Mantle to break Ruth’s record, and they were disappointed when Maris broke it instead–but overall, Maris didn’t do anything to deserve his record being slighted. However, slighted it was, even “asterisked.” It wasn’t of course actually asterisked, but that is the popular term for what Ford Frick planned to do with the record–to display the previous record for most home runs in a 154 game season alongside whatever record was listed for the 162 game season. This was basically a ploy by Ford Frick to discredit Maris’ record, because Major League Baseball doesn’t even keep an official record book, but Frick set the tone that Maris record wouldn’t be “legitimate” unless it was hit in the same number of games as Ruth’s.

Maris is probably a victim of things out of his control. He couldn’t control the fact that he set his record in 1961, the year that two new teams were added (thus creating the perception–probably correctly, that pitching was somewhat diluted over the previous year), nor could he control the fact that they added 8 games to the season. But obviously the 162 game season, and the addition of two other teams wasn’t enough to make 60 in one season “trivial.” In fact, Maris’ record stood for more years than Ruth’s did, not being broken until 1996 by Mark McGwire. In all the years since Maris hit 61 in '61, only a handful of men (Mark McGwire, Sammy Sosa, and Barry Bonds) have surpassed his feat, period. This is despite the total number of teams in the AL going up from 10 to 14, and the addition of interleague play.

There’s some impressive records in baseball that will most certainly never be broken. Ty Cobb holds the career batting average record at .366, this is a record which will almost certainly never be broken–the closest an active player is to this record is more than 30 points shy of it.

Sam Crawford holds the career record for triples, with 309–another record that will never be broken. The closest an active player is to this record is Steve Finley at 124, that is less than half of Crawford’s total. I don’t think any player has gotten close to this record in decades. In fact, I don’t believe an active player since 1928 has even had over 200 triples in their career (in 1928 that was Ty Cobb, who is number two on the all-time triples list.)

Some might argue these two records aren’t considered significant because they were set by ballplayers in an earlier era of baseball, when the game was played differently. This is certainly true, although in defense of both Cobb and Sam Crawford, even within their own eras their career numbers are only approached by a small handful of people (only 4-5 get close to Crawford, for example.) So they were not exactly easy records to get on the books.

If that’s the case, then what about the record for most RBIs in a career? Or most runs? These are records that still get approached from time to time. Barry Bonds is 82 runs shy of Ricky Henderson’s all time runs record, yet this hasn’t been hyped whatsoever. This is a record that is very hard to set, if you look at the top ten list, the only active player in it is Barry Bonds. After him Craig Biggio is down at 1830 runs and comes in at number 13 all time (very impressive, nonetheless.)

How about the career saves record? Saves are even fairly glamorous these days, as many fans have a lot of respect for the good closers. Who holds that record? Well, it’s an active player–Trevor Hoffman with 511 of them. There’s some pretty decent hurlers out there who have been closers for almost their entire careers who don’t approach that number.

Anyone who has ever seen someone hit a home run knows why none of the records I’ve mentioned are as prominent as the home run record. It isn’t because someone who can hit a lot of home runs is guaranteed to be a better contribution to a team than someone who can score a lot of runs by being a fast base runner (although that can and is often the case.) It’s just the simple fact that a home run is a raw display of power and skill, that is really awesome to see. The poster who talked about how easy it is to hit a baseball and suggested you just go to a batting cage to see…kind of misses the point. Pitching machines at your local batting cage aren’t going to know where the weakness in your swing are. They don’t throw you a 95 mph fast ball one pitch followed by a 85 mph changeup the next. They don’t throw a curveball that falls off the table, nor a slider that makes you look foolish for even swinging at it. They also don’t whizz the ball past your skull at 95 mph to brush you back and intimidate you. Hitting a baseball into play off of a major league pitcher is a serious accomplishment that most people in the world wouldn’t be capable of doing more than maybe 10-15% of the time even with substantial training and practice.

Hitting a baseball 380-450+ feet is simply unthinkable for most people. I played baseball extensively when I was growing up, and I never got anywhere close to hitting a ball that far, not off a tee, not a slow pitch from a friend et cetera. I never saw anyone hit a ball that hard, either. Not when I was watching the State High School baseball championships (that my school didn’t make.) So seeing someone able to consistently hit the ball and that far is a spectacle, and that is why the home run records are considered so sacred within baseball. However, Barry Bonds record is probably never going to be respected in the same way as the records of Ruth or Aaron. Hell, how many second-place records in professional sports get remembered for more than fifty years after the person’s death? 714 hasn’t been the record for a long, long time now, but that’s a number that is still prominent in the minds of the nation. Just as 755 will be prominent long after Aaron dies. Bonds record is going to be like Maris’ 61, it’ll be known, it’ll be accepted as the correct statistical answer. But in the hearts of the fanbase people are still going to treasure 755 more, and that’s just the “burden” that Bonds has to bear. Some of it brought on to himself, and some of it unfair (as it was with Maris.)

I read that entire post. I think I deserve an asterisk.

[denquixote]

@storyteller0910

I said it once in a different thread, and I’ll say it again: as far as I’m concerned, Bonds “accomplishment” is utterly meaningless. Hitting 756 home runs is, in and of itself, a completely arbitrary achievement. It has meaning only because we have collectively agreed that:

Under circumstances A, B, C, …, Y, Z, it is a big deal to hit 756 home runs.

(Where A = playing in major league ballparks; B = getting three strikes and four balls per at bat; C = facing major league quality pitchers; D through Y = all the other rules and guidelines of baseball, written and unwritten; and Z = not pumping yourself full of so much crap that you look like those dude who used to call the villain “Dookie” on the Gummi Bears TV show).

This collective agreement on the conditions under which a given achievement is impressive being the only thing that makes that achievement impressive, it becomes meaningless under other conditions - such as the ones under which Bonds hit his last couple hundred home runs. In sports and games, the ends can’t justify the means. Cure cancer, and then I’ll give you some leeway as to how you accomplish it. But succeeding at baseball is about nothing other than succeeding according to a certain set of rules. If you don’t follow them and then brag about your accomplishments, you might as well brag about winning thirty consecutive games of Monopoly by stealing a $500 from the bank every time you can get away with it. You “won,” sure, but in a way that means that “winning” no longer has any sort of meaning.

Oh. I know. It wasn’t against the rules of baseball at the time. Neither, I assume, was tracking the next night’s opposing pitcher down in the parking lot and pounding his throwing arm with a baseball bat, but that was still, I’m guessing, a frowned-upon tactic. Honestly, do we really need Rule 9, subsection d, codicil 112, which reads, Don’t be a fucking criminal?

Oh. I know. He didn’t know that “the cream” and “the clear” were performance enhancing drugs. You have every right to believe that a professional athlete who has made tens of millions of dollars on the ability of his body to perform complex actions consistently and precisely on demand put into his meal ticket substances about which he knew nothing, then failed to notice when his hats stopped fitting, his balls started shrinking, and he started to be able to hit the high notes in “O Mio Babbino Caro” from Gianni Schicchi. You can believe that. And if you do, OJ wants you to help him find the real killers, Pete Rose wants your vote for the Hall of Fame, and Dick Nixon’s dessicated corpse is dragging itself up from the pits of whatever miserable hell is its current residence to inform you that he was not a crook. Believe what you want. Worship at Bonds’ obscenely oversized feet until your knees are sore. I don’t understand why anyone would take enjoyment in such an artificial “moment” as Bonds’ #756, but I don’t understand the appeal of roller coasters or soccer either, and millions do, so live and let live.

Just stop expecting me to enjoy it. Concepts like “beyond a reasonable doubt” and “innocent until proven guilty” are for courts of law, where punishment is significant. When the court is “my brain” and the punishment is “I think Bonds sucks,” I need no such burden of proof. I need only to decide what is most likely: that an adult man grew into a cave troll at the age of 36, gaining unprecedented power at an age when most players start fading, by good fortune alone; or that the mountains of circumstantial evidence surrounding him most likely mean that he’s a big-headed cheater.

His record means nothing. It’s been built outside of what I consider to be “baseball.” It’s too bad that it’s gotten the attention that it has.

Let’s go A-Rod.

HEAR! HEAR!

[Queuing]

@Sitnam

When Bonds beat Hanks record, the Baseball commissioner wasn’t there to congratulate him…that speaks volumes.

You are correct…about Bud Selig. There is no excuse for not being there for what is claimed to be the most hallowed record in all of North American sports. There is one reason however; Bud Selig is a horrible commissioner.

[Jackmannii]

@Queuing

You are correct…about Bud Selig. There is no excuse for not being there for what is claimed to be the most hallowed record in all of North American sports. There is one reason however; Bud Selig is a horrible commissioner.

First he sends signals he won’t be at the potential record-tieing/breaking games, apparently due to his respect for Aaron, then he (predictably) waffles and shows up at some games, then he’s absent again. Bud never ceases to amaze in his abilitiy to displease everyone with his half-assedness.

[mhendo]

@Martin Hyde

If that’s the case, then what about the record for most RBIs in a career? Or most runs? These are records that still get approached from time to time. Barry Bonds is 82 runs shy of Ricky Henderson’s all time runs record, yet this hasn’t been hyped whatsoever. This is a record that is very hard to set, if you look at the top ten list, the only active player in it is Barry Bonds. After him Craig Biggio is down at 1830 runs and comes in at number 13 all time (very impressive, nonetheless.)

These records haven’t been hyped very much because they are not, in many senses of the word, individual records at all, and their importance as statistics is considerably overestimated by many people evaluating player ability.

RBI is an extremely unhelpful, sometimes almost meaningless statistic, because it is very largely dependent on other players’ skills, rather than on the skills of the person doing the hitting. If you come to plate 60 times during a season with a runner on third and less than two out, and you get the runner home on 50 percent of those opportunities, you can get 30 RBI without even registering a hit. And if you play for a team with a very high on-base percentage, you will likely get many more opportunities to drive in runs than someone who plays for a team with a very poor OBP.

Runs scored is also a stat very dependent on the other people in your team. Sure, in order to score a run you have to be able to get on base in the first place (by a hit, a walk, or a hit-by-pitch), but once you’re on base, your ability to get home is very much dependent on the people hitting behind you in the line-up. I’m not saying that there’s no personal ability involved; i’m just saying that stats that are reliant on other team members’ abilities should not be accorded the same significance as stats that reflect one player’s ability.

In terms of individual versus team performance, home runs rely only on the skill and power of the guy at the plate. The numbers aren’t artificially inflated or restricted by the skill (or lack thereof) of the hitter’s team-mates, whereas RBI and Runs often are.

@Martin Hyde

How about the career saves record? Saves are even fairly glamorous these days, as many fans have a lot of respect for the good closers. Who holds that record? Well, it’s an active player–Trevor Hoffman with 511 of them. There’s some pretty decent hurlers out there who have been closers for almost their entire careers who don’t approach that number.

Another overrated and, in many ways, largely meaningless statistic, considerably dependent on opportunities and longevity. Hell, the very definition of a save is arbitrary and silly, and saving a game doesn’t mean you’re a good pitcher.

It is possible for example, for a pitcher to enter 50 games in the 9th inning during the course of a season with his team up by three runs. In those 50 appearances, he might give up three hits, a walk, and two runs in every appearance, and still save every game. This would give the pitcher an ERA of about 18.00, and a WHIP of about 4.00, and 50 saves. Would you want that guy on your team?

Is that an exaggerated example? Sure. But while many closers in baseball are incredibly good pitchers, evaluating them by the number of saves they make is about the least logical thing a GM could do. If you want to argue that Trevor Hoffman is a good pitcher, you shouldn’t point to his saves, you should look at his career ERA (2.68) or, even better, his career WHIP of 1.03, which is second on the list of active pitchers with more than 200 innings pitched (Billy Wagner is first).

Of course, a closer should have a better WHIP than a starter, because he only has to come in and work one inning and doesn’t usually have a chance to get tired, or for the hitting team to get used to his stuff. But even for a closer, Hoffman’s WHIP and ERA are both excellent. The fact that Pedro Martinez, a starting pitcher, also has a WHIP of 1.03 just goes to show how awesome Pedro has been over the course of his career.

@Martin Hyde

Anyone who has ever seen someone hit a home run knows why none of the records I’ve mentioned are as prominent as the home run record. It isn’t because someone who can hit a lot of home runs is guaranteed to be a better contribution to a team than someone who can score a lot of runs by being a fast base runner.

Actually, that’s exactly what it is.

A home run is the single most valuable thing a player can do when he steps to the plate. Being a fast and skilled base runner is a good thing, but when measured against offensive production at the plate, it’s so much less important than the ability to hit that the two stats are barely in the same ballpark.

Henderson’s success rate at stealing bases over his career was almost exactly 80%. According to the guys at Baseball Prospectus, the break-even success rate for stealing over the years that Henderson played averaged out at about 73%, with a low of 66% in 1985, and a high of 78% around 2000. The break-even point is the point at which the benefit of the successful stolen bases is equal to the losses incurred by the unsuccessful steals (i.e., caught stealing). So, over Henderson’s career, he had to make sure that he stole successfully 73% of the time just to ensure that his stealing didn’t cost him team runs. Even his 80% success rate, though, didn’t actually ad many runs for his team; his value came mainly from his hitting and his on-base percentage.

As the guys at Baseball Prospectus say: if Rickey Henderson had been as slow as Pete Incaviglia, “The game would certainly be less exciting, but Henderson’s value would hardly be different…If he’d been only as good as Incaviglia on the basepaths over his career, he would have contributed about 5 fewer wins in 25 seasons,” or about 0.2 wins a years. For a guy whose career WARP3 averaged out to about 6.1 wins per season, 0.2 wins per season from baserunning ability is not very much at all. His hitting and OBP were much more important.

@Martin Hyde

It’s just the simple fact that a home run is a raw display of power and skill…

…and the single most valuable thing a player can do when he steps to the plate.

[Omegaman]

I don’t follow baseball but what struck me was that Hank Aaron offered what I thought was heartfelt congratulations to Barry on breaking his record. To me, It speaks a lot more about Hanks character as I’m fairly certain he didn’t use steroids to set the original record.

[Frosted_Glass]

Is it bad that I could care less one way or the other? I just do not understand why everyone gets so worked up over this. Athletes from high school through the pros test the boundaries of cheating and enhancing their own performance constantly. Barry Bonds is an entertainer who is paid to hit a ball. (I would add field in here as well but lets be honest, he is not much of a fielder today due to his injury problems) Personally, I find it infinitely more offensive when Olympic athletes cheat. Olympic athletes represent their country, not a corporation. Of course, when they test positive for steroids it gets put on the back pages of sports columns next to the harness racing results. The controversy never lasts as long and no one seems to care what they do for very long.

There is one thing that I am certain of, with regards to Bonds and the steroid controversy. His, potentially, tainted record has been great for baseball. I have followed baseball for as long as I can remember and I have never seen so many different people take an interest in what is going on in the MLB. This is one of the biggest reasons that I disagree with people who feel that Bonds is “the worst thing to happen to baseball ever”. How can someone who has brought interest and attention to the game be bad for it? People argue that he has called the integrity of the game into question but no matter how you look at it, he has increased both awareness in and the popularity of the MLB.

[Dead_Badger]

@Frosted Glass

Of course, when they test positive for steroids it gets put on the back pages of sports columns next to the harness racing results.

This certainly doesn’t tally with my experience, at least here in the UK. Drugs cheats of all stripes from Ben Johnson onwards have attracted massive coverage. Even when it’s athletes who the public at large have barely heard of, it’s news.

The controversy never lasts as long and no one seems to care what they do for very long.

Well, yeah; because they get banned and their careers effectively end. Thus, no more story. It plays once and is then done, by its very nature. Not so with Bonds; I can’t think of any athlete who has continued their career at the top level for so long, after having been so comprehensively exposed as a cheat. He’s practically unique in that respect, which is why this story has run so long, and so loud. Unlike most cheats, whose achievements typically come before their exposure (and subsequently cease), Bonds has continued to compete at the highest level long after his steroid use became obvious. The media has hardly ever had the opportunity to excoriate a cheat while he’s competing, so the attention is hardly surprising.

[Subterraneanus]

Sometimes I think that the circle-jerk and the witch-hunt are the very basis of human society.

[storyteller0910]

@Subterraneanus

Sometimes I think that the circle-jerk and the witch-hunt are the very basis of human society.

Sometimes I think that the phrase “witch hunt” is the single most overused in human society.

[you_with_the_face]

To an outsider who couldn’t care less if baseball died and went to hell tomorrow, this whole controversy looks like a baffling waste of energy and emotion.

We are talking about a bunch of guys hitting a ball with a stick and getting dirt on their clothes for no practical reason. Yes, there’s tradition and hot dogs and memories. Yeah, America’s pasttime, peanuts and fireworks, statistics, red dirt, and music, rah-rah-rah, whatever. But take away all the hoohah and jizz and all you’re left with is a bunch of guys hitting a ball with a stick over and over again. Yeah, sometimes they hit that ball real hard and it flops into the stands. That was cool the first few hundred times it happened.

Count me in the “who gives a fuck?” pile. Youda thought Victor Newman from The Young and the Restless had committed murder suicide or something, given the amount of attention this “catastrophe” has been given.

Yall can beat me up now. I know I was asking for it, so I don’t mind the abuse.