By Art Spander
Day by day, leak by leak, Barry Bonds keeps looking better and baseball worse. Bonds didn’t ruin the game. Bonds didn’t poison pigeons or fail to stand for the national anthem. He simply used performance enhancing drugs.
So, we learn, did a great many others, A-Rod, the Rocket, Manny and now, according to one of those anonymous reports — this one on the New York Times web site, which makes it considerably more credible than others — David Ortiz.
We may not be amused, but neither are we surprised, about the names or the fact the names keep being made public, despite promises no such things would happen.
Players, dozens of them, were tested in 2003 and told the results would remain secret. That would have been impossible.
If we know what’s going on in the White House we’re going to know what’s going on in Bud Selig’s House. You think those TV shows stay on the air because people don’t like to talk?
Bonds now is insignificant. We went after him and his silent partner, Greg Anderson, the trainer, so long ago it’s almost ancient history. Mark Fainaru-Wada and his then San Francisco Chronicle colleague Lance Williams left no syringe unturned. We acted like the sky was falling, then shrugged.
What’s falling now are other names into place, the latest of those Ortiz and Manny, who in 2004 combined to help the Red Sox win their first World Series in 86 years. And just an aside, you think any of those self-righteous Boston fans would give back the title because, like the Bonds homers they yelped about, it might be tainted?
The line forms on the right. Soon there will be more stars who used what daintily are known as “performance enhancing drugs,” or PEDs, than didn’t. It was common practice. It was, some will argue, a necessity.
In their book, “Game of Shadows,” Fainaru-Wada and Williams insist what pushed Bonds over the edge was watching Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa in their magical run in 1998 and bristling that the two were getting more attention than he.
Barry got his attention and his home run record. Does it deserve an asterisk, as Hank Aaron, who held the old mark, contends? Maybe. But Selig, the commissioner, is loath to tarnish his legacy. So there aren’t going to be any little stars next to a name with the notation, “Was thought to have put something into his body besides milk and honey.”
Players took steroids. Baseball did nothing to stop them until it was too late. Back in the 1989 World Series, the one in which an earthquake had us much more frightened than a little thing like illegal substances, somebody mentioned a drink called the “Canseco Cocktail.”
In theory, Jose — looking, well, bulked up — was ingesting stuff that enabled him to hit that shot into the third deck of the place now called Rogers Centre but then known as SkyDome.
How naïve. He wasn’t taking things orally, he was taking injections in his bottom, not that the method was of such great importance.
After the New York Times disclosures on Ortiz and Ramirez — revelations, they’re not — Canseco said he wasn’t surprised. Neither was anybody else, Jose. But we have to find people willing to give their opinions, and inevitably when drugs and baseball are involved, Canseco appears as an expert witness.
The probability that anyone who starting in the mid-1990s hit a lot of balls over fences was artificially enhanced has turned into a very good one. The probability that those major leaguers who agreed to be tested “secretly” in 2002 will be outed is an excellent one.
The feds, knowing all too well that steroids were illegal in America, if not America’s national pastime, seized the results of the tests. Now newspapers are seizing the chance to make everyone look bad.
The Times says its information about Ramirez and Ortiz “emerged through interviews with multiple lawyers and others connected to the pending litigation.” The lawyers spoke anonymously, the Times said, because the testing information is under seal by a court order.
Barry Bonds has a different problem. He’s being hounded by the government on charges of perjury, the U.S. claiming he lied under oath when in December 2003 Barry said he never used the stuff.
But the guess is that Barry never will come to trial. And who cares anymore? He took his grief. He was the Lone Ranger, the one who stood alone until it seems there was no room left on the list for all players who were guilty. The line forms to the right.
As a reporter since 1960, Art Spander is a living treasure of sports history. A recipient of the Dick McCann Memorial Award — given for his long and distinguished career covering professional football — he has earned himself a spot in the Pro Football Hall of Fame. He was recently honored with the Lifetime Achievement Award by the PGA of America for 2009.
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