This is an updated tweaking of a story I did last year. Bonds and the Giants visit town this weekend.he was still the worst player in the history of the game. And let’s face it; was it not brutally obvious that Mark McGuire and Sammy Sosa were on the juice during that great chase of ’98 that gave us all the fuzzies? So why does Barry not get treated like the star athlete that he is when he comes to Philly? Because he doesn’t operate under a facade of niceness, b/c his p.r. people don’t tell him to offer up a bunch of b.s. about “taking it one day at a time” and giving “110 percent”? You people always complain about how boring athletes are, then you get a guy who speaks his mind and you decide to hate him. Ridiculous double standard.
But what this really comes down to is the rules. Should Cy Young be villified b/c he was allowed to throw the spitball, which is now against the rules? No, so why should Bonds be villified for using steroids at a time when they were not only legal in baseball, but encouraged? It’s obvious that McGuire woulda never hit all those homers and gotten all those endorsement deals without the help of steroids, so why should Bonds be treated any differently than McGuire? The fact that baseball encouraged steroid use is baseball’s fault, not Bonds’s fault. He saw an opportunity to improve his game, and make himself better and his team better. And he did so in a way that he knew could potentially hurt his own health. He did what all the great ones do: He put it all on the line to improve his game within the framework of the rules. And you people, who call yourselves baseball fans, continue to boo him.
