Your Steroid Resource

November 18, 2007
BY MIKE HUTTON Post-Tribune staff writer

If the Feds get him, I won’t feel any sense of satisfaction.

The steroid problem in baseball is so deep and rooted in the fabric of the game over the last 20 years, that to throw Barry Bonds out there as some kind of scapegoat for HGH, anabolic steroids or name-your-designer-drug-of-choice seems a little ridiculous.

Here is Bonds’ problem. He was too good. Too good at hitting mammoth home runs and presumably too good at shooting himself up with whatever he used to get bigger and stronger. Just maybe, if he only hit 550 home runs or so, he wouldn’t be subject to this willy-nilly witch hunt.

He, of course, isn’t the only one in baseball that used steroids.

Mark McGwire, Sammy Sosa, Roger Clements, Rafael Palmiero, Gary Sheffield, Mike Piazza.

Those are at the top of my suspected list of steroid abusers, along with Bonds. There are dozens of others, too. You know it. I know it. The Feds know it and the people that run baseball know it.

Give me one good reason that Bonds should take the fall for a generation of steroid users. The fact that he allegedly lied to a grand jury is a problem, I admit.

My question then is this: Can we put Donald Fehr, Bud Selig and the baseball owners away for 10 years, too, for being complicit co-conspirators in the great big steroid problem? When will they convene grand juries for those folks?

They loved the towering home runs, just like the fans who spilled into the ballparks loved it when the seams split on those baseballs as they traveled out of the park.

They snickered when Sosa told us he was taking nothing stronger than Flintstones vitamins and then went on with their day after Sosa popped another one out of Wrigley Field.

Bonds gets busted because he’s angry and surly and uncooperative and way too prideful for his own good. And because he broke Hank Aaron’s all-time home run record.

But that makes him no more guilty than the rest of them.

There is nothing to be gained from locking up Bonds.

This isn’t like assault and battery. As far as I know, Bonds didn’t hurt anyone — except himself and the integrity of the game. Start writing down names if that qualifies as a condition for getting thrown into the slammer. It’s a long list.

You can’t go back and replay the last couple of decades of baseball. It’s done. It’s over with. It was bad. It was a really, really messed up time in the game. It’s impossible though to say you are going to bring justice against one guy.

Baseball needs to fight hard for the blood test for HGH. They need to continue to be as punitive as possible with players who use steroids.

The Feds, meanwhile, need to drop this whole charade. It’s a waste of time and it will do nothing to make up for what damage has already been incurred.

Bonds will pay for his sins perpetually in the public eye. Already, we make judgements on his prodigious home run totals. We look at him cynically and sigh, knowing that something wasn’t quite right about what happened.

That is punishment enough.

Contact Mike Hutton at 648-3139 or mhutton@post-trib.com