This Barry thing needs to stop. All the talk of asterisks needs to stop. I literally have so many thoughts about this going through my head, that I’m having a hard time forming them into anything coherent. But here we go.
I have made this argument time after time. Until someone can show me Barry Bonds’ positive test for steroids I will never believe it. Barry Bonds has never failed a steroid test. Allow me to repeat myself, Barry…Bonds…has….NEVER…failed…a steroid test. That in itself should end all of this speculation. How on earth one can accuse someone of doing something when there is evidence pointing directly against it is beyond me. In the media, thanks to our sensationalism and complete lack of sensitivity, we have taken ‘innocent until proven guilty’ into ‘guilty until proven innocent’. The media would rather run with a story, find out it isn’t quite what it thought it was, make a mess but never clean it up. Instead going to the next story. I mean just look at this summer. Paris Hilton? Lindsay Lohan? Chris Benoit? Any of these stories still on the news? Nope, we’re talking about the collapse of the bridge, we’re talking about Barry Bonds, we’re talking about the next big story. It’s ridiculous.
That book came out and everyone just accepted it as truth like it was the Bible. Jack the Blogger makes an excellent point about the difference between Barry Bonds and Lance Armstrong. Lance Armstrong was accused of failing drug tests and being on steroids for years. But if you ask people, they will say he is the greatest athlete of all-time. The difference between Lance and Barry, in my eyes is that people wanted to believe in Lance. People needed to believe that Lance was clean, so they took what they heard and called it BS. Lance was such a good man, such a great story that they could not believe any sort of nonsense against their hero. Barry on the other hand…Barry has always marched to the beat of his own drum. And the mainly white media who reports baseball did not like it one bit, because he is an asshole. They made most of the country believe he was a cheating asshole. So once that book came out, they had their validation. They no longer had to feel bad for hating the guy, that was their “proof”. They needed a reason to legitimately hate the guy and that book gave it to them. Ever since then there has been no looking back.
Steroids don’t give you the gift of being able to hit home runs. Look at Jason Giambi. Their is a guy who used steroids and admitted it…he wasn’t jacking home runs out the park left and right. Mark McGwire took andro, Sammy Sosa was on the juice. And when they got off what they were on, guess what? They sucked. And they sucked bad. No one remembers McGwire’s last year where he was batting .182 and retired halfway through. No one talks about Sammy with the Baltimore Orioles. If this man Barry Bonds was on steroids, than why is he still hitting home runs? He didn’t all of a sudden start jacking 60+ a year like a mad man, as a matter of fact he only hit more than 50 home runs once in his career. When he hit 73 in one year, by the way that was one of the last years I was really into baseball. It just doesn’t add up to me.
I’m tired of hearing people drag Hank Aaron’s name into this. The same people that are in uproar that Barry is taking the record from Hank are the same people who were saying “I can’t believe this nigger is about to break the Babe’s record.” I don’t care what anyone says, its convenient to believe in Hank Aaron now. Nobody believed in him when he was breaking the record. It was unbelievable that a black man was going to “ruin” the greatest record in all of sports. But now people want to talk about “disgraceful” it is for Aaron to lose the record. I see through the hypocrisy. You don’t like Barry because he doesn’t put up with the media’s bullshit. One thing you absolutely have to admire about Barry Bonds is the fact that after all this time, he truely does not care what anyone in this world thinks about him.
Think about that. And let that man have his moment. He is the greatest home-run hitter of all time, and if you want to put an asterisk by the number 756 than you might as well do this
MLB*