Bonds in Review

Everybody and their mother is writing about Barry Bonds this week, as the Onion aptly points out. They are responding to the book Game of Shadows, an excerpt of which is published in Sports Illustrated (click the link to read).

David Pinto has some things to say about the article’s accusations:

So on one hand, we are told that you can't gain 15 pounds of muscle in 100 days
without drugs, but Jason Schmidt gains 20 pounds and insists he's clean. Which
is it?

I am not a doctor, or a physical fitness expert of any sort, but I don’t have that tough of a time believing that someone in the shape of a world class athlete but who is not already particularly muscular can naturally bulk up to Bonds’ size in his mid-30’s.

Pinto doesn’t make note of another of the excerpt’s anecdotes of Bonds’ drug use, that in the 1999 season (before his injury) he batted .366 in 12 games. As any sabermetrician worth his salt can tell you, this number is exceptionally grounded in luck, you can find 12 game stretches in the season of any .235 hitter where they hit better than .366. In that short of a period we are talking about mere handfuls of hits, in other words “beware the small sample size.” Even if we could identify a legitimate improvement, it would be more aptly explained by the increased confidence that the Roids (or simply the added muscle mass) gave Bonds than the actual physical results of taking them. There is no reason at all to suppose that this statistical issue is connected with steroid use.

Those who go out of their way to write nasty things about Barry Bonds have a habit of using poor or emotional arguments. Despite all of this it is likely, for many reasons, that Bonds did take steroids so we are led to a secondary question. Are the records of baseball honest if they include Bonds?

John Brattain at the Hardball Times has input on this second question. He suggests that Bonds belongs in the record books, but that we will always attach the qualifier “but he used steroids” in discussion of his records. This is, I think, the appropriate attitude. The homeruns were hit nothing more can be said. To leave him out of the books, or to place him arbitrarily lower than Ruth and Aaron would be an insult to the records of those men and in general. Rather, record the facts and discuss the implications openly… denial doesn’t correct the problem.

However, I do question that a few decades now we will still be talking about this the same way. When Maris hit his 61, in the first 162 game season, it was argued that his record was worthless due to the fact that he had achieved it in more games than were allowed previous players. Before long this was forgotten. I will not suggest that Bonds’ situation is the same as that of Maris (first of all, players since Maris have all had 162 games in which to break their records, we hope that future players will not all use steroids). I will, however, point out that the situations are not entirely dissimilar and the question of what, exactly, separates them is complex. Baseball history might remember and accept the late nineties as the steroid era… if it does, we will likely remember Bonds more as the highest achiever of his time and less as the asterisk in the record book.

And even if steroids are inexplicably remembered only in relation to Bonds, there is still this to contend with:

Roger Clemens, here pitching for Team USA, called the information on Bonds "a witch hunt," adding, "You still have to hit the baseball."

Bonds' swing is, in fact, particularly admirable. Or, at least, that is what the hitting coaches seem to think.