Thoughts on Barry Bonds's 756th home run
1. It's pretty obvious that Barry Bonds did steroids at some point, particularly when he hit 73 homers in 2001 at age 37 after previously never hitting more than 47. That said, even without the juice, he's one of the greatest players ever. The tragedy is that being ONE OF the greatest ever wasn't good enough for him. He saw the adulation that Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa were getting even though they were cheating, and he decided to cheat too in order to bring some of that adulation toward himself. The irony is, now that McGwire and Sosa have both been discredited, if Bonds had stayed clean, he would now be heralded as a shining example of pure, unadulterated greatness. Now he's just another cheater with an asterisk next to his name alongside McGwire, Sosa, Jason Giambi, Rafael Palmeiro, Jose Canseco, and others, none of whom were as good as Bonds was naturally.
2. Steroids? Who cares? There is a case to be made that steroids are just another artificial enhancement alonside millions of other artificial enhancements. Aren't glasses an artificial enhancement to one's naturally subpar eyesight? If glasses were banned, we would never have had Greg Maddux. How about other legal dietary supplements? How about smaller stadiums and cleaner ballfields and better practice facilities? What about the fact that players today can have more surgeries than players in the past? The point is, baseball is a fundamentally assymetrical game. Eras have different characteristics, and those need to be taken into account whenever someone compares players or teams across many years. This era is simply an era in which many home runs are hit, just as the late 1960s were an era of many great pitchers.
3. Why are steroids banned anyway? I mean, they're only dangerous to the people that use them. Those people are paid millions of dollars, and they choose to use the juice out of their own free will. Why not let them? Let's see how many homers a human being can really hit. Let's see just how well a human can run/bike/lift/etc. I'm being semi-facetious but only semi.
4. I still say Babe Ruth is the greatest baseball player ever. He's third on the all-time home run list and had a higher batting average than almost every other slugger of comparable power. Plus, most importantly, he was a great pitcher before he even became known as a power hitter. He probably would've gone to the Hall of Fame if he had never left the mound in Boston.
2. Steroids? Who cares? There is a case to be made that steroids are just another artificial enhancement alonside millions of other artificial enhancements. Aren't glasses an artificial enhancement to one's naturally subpar eyesight? If glasses were banned, we would never have had Greg Maddux. How about other legal dietary supplements? How about smaller stadiums and cleaner ballfields and better practice facilities? What about the fact that players today can have more surgeries than players in the past? The point is, baseball is a fundamentally assymetrical game. Eras have different characteristics, and those need to be taken into account whenever someone compares players or teams across many years. This era is simply an era in which many home runs are hit, just as the late 1960s were an era of many great pitchers.
3. Why are steroids banned anyway? I mean, they're only dangerous to the people that use them. Those people are paid millions of dollars, and they choose to use the juice out of their own free will. Why not let them? Let's see how many homers a human being can really hit. Let's see just how well a human can run/bike/lift/etc. I'm being semi-facetious but only semi.
4. I still say Babe Ruth is the greatest baseball player ever. He's third on the all-time home run list and had a higher batting average than almost every other slugger of comparable power. Plus, most importantly, he was a great pitcher before he even became known as a power hitter. He probably would've gone to the Hall of Fame if he had never left the mound in Boston.