Bonds’s Records, Put in Context
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.
Of the many controversies attendant on baseball’s burgeoning steroids scandal, the one that seems silliest to me concerns Barry Bonds’s place in history. Thomas Boswell of the Washington Post, one of the great sportswriters in the country, speaks for many when he writes:
“Throw every record that Bonds has set in the past four years into the trash can that history reserves for cheats …. There is no reason Bonds should ever again be considered one of the top 10 hitters who ever lived. The true elite – including Babe Ruth, Hank Aaron, Ted Williams and Willie Mays – are back where they belong.”
With all respect to Boswell and to the many thoughtful people who share his views, this is a lot of rubbish. Bonds’s alleged admission that he used performance-enhancing drugs offered by Balco might well affect one’s view of his character – it would be impossible, really, for it not to. His apparent perjury (unless one really believes he mistook “the clear” for flaxseed oil) may eventually lead to criminal charges, or banishment from baseball. He’s no hero, no Jackie Robinson or Christy Mathewson. But to think that his use of steroids fundamentally alters his place in the baseball firmament is daft.
The drugs Bonds was using prior to 2003 were, for one thing, not banned by Major League Baseball. While this doesn’t make it less wrong for him to have sought unfair advantage, it does change the context of his drug use in terms of judging his performance historically. Baseball’s tacit encouragement of steroid use makes it less an individual offense and more a broad condition of the game, something we have to consider when judging Bonds’s impact.
Anyone who thinks Bonds, Jose Canseco, Ken Caminiti, and Jason Giambi are the only juiced MVPs of the last decade and a half is out of their mind. Plenty of great players injected themselves with drugs, as did some mediocre ones – remember, Marvin Benard and Randy Velarde were among the initial names to arise in the Balco case. None of them, other than Bonds, hit like Babe Ruth.
When comparing Bonds to Mays we do have to keep in mind that Mays wasn’t taking human growth hormone – but we also have to keep in mind that he wasn’t facing juiced-up pitchers throwing 93-mph sliders in the late innings. If Bonds were the only chemical creation of his time, there might be some logic behind calls to throw his records in the trash can; as things were, he was playing the same game as virtually all the great sluggers of his time, just better.
When evaluating players historically, we can only truly judge one thing: How did they affect the game as it was played in their time? Bonds has done more to impact games than anyone else who ever lived, whatever the reason. It also bears mentioning that Bonds was, for years before he began to bulk up, by far the best player of his generation. That can’t simply be wished away.
It’s not too difficult, if one is so inclined, to come up with reasons why the records of nearly all the greatest players in history should be disregarded. Of the 10 players to whom Bonds, according to the similarity scores at www.baseball-reference.com, bears the most resemblance:
* Four (Ruth, Mel Ott, Jimmie Foxx, and Lou Gehrig) played in whites-only leagues. Another, Williams, played the early part of his career in one, and the latter part of it in an American League that was integrated in name only. The same partly applies to another name on this list, Mickey Mantle.
* Three (Mays, Aaron, and Frank Robinson) played in leagues where many players took the field high on amphetamines, which they ingested because they believed the drugs improved their performance. Mays, for one, is known to have indulged in amphetamines.
* Three (Ott, Gehrig, and Foxx) had some of their greatest seasons in the 1930s, when offense was every bit as cheap as it is now.
There is no moral equivalence between Barry Bonds taking steroids and Lou Gehrig playing in a segregated league; Bonds did wrong, while Gehrig played in a league where wrong was done, through no fault of his own. There can be no comparison, though, if we’re just asking whose records are made less impressive because of the conditions in which they played. Bonds took drugs his sport declined to prohibit out of greed and fear; Gehrig didn’t compete against many of the best players of his time.
None of this means we shouldn’t discount much of what Bonds has done. If our standard of legitimacy is a game in which all men of sufficient talent play to the best of their natural ability, then what he did was illegitimate to some degree. But by that standard, every record ever set in baseball was illegitimate. The game was only properly integrated in the 1960s, around the same time performance-enhancing drugs became popular. To weigh these things against one another, to acknowledge them and to take into account the conditions of the game at different points is the essence of historical judgment.
Achievement in baseball has always mattered only in context. Those who pretend that steroids have ruined baseball’s records are pretending that dead numbers have meaning outside the interpretations we make of them. The rational end of their argument is that the 0.86 ERA Tim Keefe posted in 1880 and Hugh Duffy’s 1894 batting average of .440 are real records, simply because that is what the sacred record books say.
That is, of course, nonsense. No one takes Keefe’s records seriously, because we understand they are a product of their circumstances. In time, the same judgment may be made of Bonds’s records; perhaps it will not. Either way, he is not outside the traditions of baseball, but squarely within them, a point we should all keep in mind as we ponder how to edge the game closer to the ideals of legitimacy we wish for it.