The 2007 major league baseball season will be remembered as a year that saw records fail. The Astros' Craig Biggio got his 3,000th hit. Tom Glavine won his 300th career game; he might be the last pitcher to do that for a long time. Sammy Sosa came back to the game after taking a year off to get hiss 600th career home run. Frank Thomas and Alex Rodriquez each got his 500th, and Jim Thome may yet join them this season. The biggest record of all, however, is the most controversial. Baseball doesn't know what to do about Barry Bonds.
Bonds' assault on Henry Aaron's career home run record is the biggest story of this baseball season, but not only because of the achievement. How Bonds may have achieved it is at issue. The three men who have more than 700 career home runs are extremely different. Babe Ruth dominated the game the way no other player has even while drinking, eating as he chose, and staying out all night. Before the Yankees made him their top slugger, Rith was a top pitcher for the Red Sox. Aaron was always one of the top players during his prime, but his calling card was consistency. His career started in the early years of integrating the majors, and he had to put up with racist threats-- including death threats-- as he approached Ruth's record. Barry Bonds seems to be a solid family man, and he certainly has deep roots in the history of the game, but he is dogged by how he may have decided to play the game.
Barry's father, Bobby, was one of the best players of his generation; Barry's godfather is Willie Mays, a man often considered the best all-around player ever, and a man beloved by baseball fans of several generations. Barry Bonds might never have been beloved, but he was well on his way to a Hall of Fame career until baseballs began exploding out of ballparks in the mid-1990s. Suspicions are extremely high now-- and in some cases confirmed-- that at least some players were using certain steroids and human growth hormones to increase their strength. Barry Bonds, with his extraordinary power numbers late in his career, was seen as one possible user.
Baseball has a problem-- a moral problem. If Bonds is ever proven to have taken performance-enhancing substances, his records might be ignored, but would that be fair if many other players were doing the same? The job of any professional athlete is to compete, after all. He, or someone else, could have competed, of course, by blowing the whistle on substance abuse at the beginning, but no one did. Suppose Bonds is never proven to have done anything wrong, but is never affirmatively cleared, either? Is he still a first ballot, top flight Hall of Famer? What about Sammy Sosa, Mark McGwire, or Rafael Palmiero? Will all the power hitting records of an entire generation be asterisked because some players may have used chemicals to bulk up?
Barry Bonds is still under investigation for possible perjury. He could conceivably go to prison. If he does, the baseball hall of fame might be without the sport's hit leader, Pete Rose, and home run leader for a very long time. That might be bad news for a sport that seems to have fallen behind the NFL in popularity. On the other hand, holding to its rules and sense of integrity over simple numbers woyld be another useful example given to the nation by The Game.
