Barry Bonds Returns to Baseball, Baseball Still Hypocritical

For some reason I get Comcast Sports Bay Area with my cable TV package. It's weird seeing promotions for Oakland A's spring training updates and Golden State Warriors coverage.

On Monday they broadcast a press conference involving Barry Bonds, who will be spending a few days with the San Francisco Giants in spring training as a guest hitting coach. This marks Bonds' return to the game after retirement, conviction, and failing to be elected into the Hall of Fame.

He was asked 45 questions (not counting multi-part questions and follow-ups). Only 10 of them had to do with PEDs or the Hall of Fame. Many were about his responsibilities as a guest hitting coach. There was also a number of suck-up questions phrased in ways to praise his greatness. "These kids are in awe of you..." one question began.

I don't want Bonds to be cross-examined wherever he goes. Nor do I think he should be issued a restraining order by the game of baseball and court ordered to remain 300 yards from any MLB facility. I do, however, think it's odd that the faces of PEDs in baseball are being invited back to the game. Mark McGwire, for example, as the hitting coach for the Dodgers.

The hypocrisy of the PED era remains alive and well. The game wants to appear clean and so it harshly and publicly punishes those who break the rules. Yet teams welcome back McGwire and Bonds. The Bay Area media treat Barry Bonds like a king, and they defend him like his knights. Meanwhile the high priests of the BBWAA judge him as a sinner, even though for years they praised him as he sinned.

The 30 Major League clubs have made a big deal to demonstrate their absolute intolerance of PEDs. They even went so far as to suspend Alex Rodriguez for a bizarre number of games. The 30 clubs don't want PEDs to be part of the game.

If you were to create a Mount Rushmore of PED usage in baseball, Barry Bonds' swollen cranium would be up there, along with McGwire's, and then Jose Canseco and A-Rod. Baseball wants PEDs out, yet PED users are welcome to return.

It's baseball saying one thing and doing another. It's baseball writers saying one thing and doing another.

At least McGwire admitted it. Kind of. Actually, let's not praise McGwire for his post-PED "honesty." When Bonds was asked on Monday if he should admit to his usage, he gave this answer worthy of a politician:

"I already went to court and that's where I'll leave it."

When asked about Biogenesis he responded:

"I don't want to get into that at all."

When asked about his intimidating persona, Bonds modestly admitted "I had teammates who said 'Barry, you're too nice.'"

The question I would have asked is "What will you say to a young player who tells you he's thinking about doing a little something extra, maybe outside of the rules, to help himself out, and wants to know your thoughts on that?" That's the question to ask. It falls within his role as a guest coach, he'll probably still give a meaningless answer, but it's not a direct, accusatory question about his PED use either. You can even add "As a veteran," or "As someone who played in the era."

I'm not mad at Bonds. I'm mad at the game for making a spectacle of punishing steroid and HGH users, and then welcoming the men who inspired that use back into the game as coaches.

More than that, I'm mad at the Bay Area media who have been Bonds apologists for years. They've given Bonds more free passes than NL pitchers did. There were only a handful of difficult questions for Bonds to answer. And when he was asked if he was jealous or upset about the Giants winning the World Series without him in 2010 and 2012, one of the gathered media pointed out that Bonds was at the games and cheering. The Bay Area press stood and defended Bonds like knights defend their king.

At the end of the press conference, the microphone caught reporters saying "Thanks, Barry." And "Good job."

And while one segment of baseball media defends Bonds at all costs, another has the unshakable stance that he should never enter The Hall of Fame except as a paying customer. Both groups are hypocrites. Both are fighting a battle over ethics, but doing so in unethical ways. The Bay Area Knights of Bonds dismiss and excuse any and all wrongdoing by their king. And the high priests of the BBWAA have banished him from Cooperstown because of his sins, even though those same priests praised him endlessly while he was sinning.

Baseball wants to seem clean, yet guys like McGwire and Bonds still carry their inflated skulls and massive biceps around baseball clubhouses. Even if they are clean as coaches, what's the message to young players? Take PEDs, hit 600+ homeruns, then get paid to coach. No Hall of Fame? No problem.

Then the writers are divided on how to be unethical and wrong in their coverage of the game. Some want to gloss over the truth or explain it away. Some with sin want to cast the first stone.

All are wrong. The 30 clubs punish violations too harshly, and also shouldn't welcome back famous cheaters with open arms while doing so. And the media shouldn't be so entrenched with their positions. Bonds can be a cheater and a Hall of Famer. He can be bad and be great.

BBWAA Covers PED Story 15 Years Late

Firstly, how stupid is it to have an envelope-opening-ceremony when you know the envelope is empty? That was baseball at its most baseballiness yesterday. Just have a press conference and be done with it.

Now to the meat of the discussion. No player was voted into the Hall of Fame by the pompous BBWAA (Baseball Writers' Association of America). A slugger with 762 HRs, 514 steals, and 7 MVPs received 36.2% of the vote. A pitcher with 354 wins and 7 Cy Youngs received only 38.8% Why? Because of PEDs.

I hate Barry Bonds. And I can't wait to DVR Roger Clemens's funeral so I can watch it again and again, and have a chuckle anytime I want. But these guys were never caught, never convicted, and they were damn good players even before the likely start of their PED cycles. Bonds won the MVP 3 times from 1990 to 1993. Clemens won 3 of his Cy Youngs in Boston.

But no, in this issue full of grey area and complex questions, the BBWAA has taken a simple black and white stance. Suspicion=guilt. Even being surrounded by suspicious players means you're guilty. However the BBWAA isn't looking for justice. They simply want to punish the players who threatened the illusion that baseball is something special, something pure. This is about vengeance.

Documentarian Ken Burns made some remarks that clearly demonstrate the punitive attitudes of those who voted against Bonds and Clemens:

"We know some pitchers extended their playing careers, we know some people hit the ball farther... those motherfuckers should suffer for a while."

Yes, Ken Burns actually said that.

Suffer? Motherfuckers? These sound like the words of someone being interviewed outside a Court House, after some thugs were convicted of murdering his children. I can picture Samuel L. Jackson saying this, not Ken Burns.

He and the BBWAA have no right to mount such high horses. They were all complicit in the steroid era, particularly the BBWAA. The writers, whose job it is to find stories and write about them, somehow missed the biggest story in sports for well over a decade. They followed every movement of Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa, and later Barry Bonds, and yet found nothing suspicious? They did no digging, they didn't look for anything to make Big Mac and Sosa look bad.

And when people did speculate or point out the rapid increase in homeruns, they were dismissed as cynics. And then writers talked about how tightly wound the ball was, and how that was making them fly out of the park at absurd rates. And the reason biceps were bursting was due to modern weight-training techniques and protein shakes. Every theory except for illegal PEDs was used to explain the ridiculous amount of homeruns being hit.

The BBWAA was willfully negligent, and they missed the story. Now, since they couldn't punish these players with words, they're punishing them with votes.

Well it's too late. What's done is done. You let this happen. So did the owners, so did MLB, so did the MLBPA, so did the fans. We all let this happen, and we enjoyed it. And it can't be erased. Just like segregation can't be erased. Or the reserve-clause era before free agency. Or the cocaine-era.

A friend of mine pointed out that the Hall of Fame is primarily a museum of the game's history. The writers want to rewrite the history (which they initially did not write about), and that's just wrong. The BBWAA should vote for people they don't like, vote for sluggers with muscles throbbing with HGH, vote for pitchers who extended their careers. It might hurt the BBWAA to do so, but to quote Ken Burns, those motherfuckers should suffer for a while.