Barry Bonds, the Anti-Ruth

December 9, 2004

Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa. The howling mob is right; I was wrong.

At the end of the baseball season, more than two months ago, I marveled at Barry Bonds’s preternatural batting statistics. Since then, countless readers have chidden me for

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ignoring the obvious role steroids have played in enabling Bonds to rewrite the record book from top to bottom.

I can only plead that I was trying to give him the benefit of doubt. I should have saved my sympathy for Scott Peterson.

I couldn’t believe that “performance-enhancing substances” could really enhance performance to such super-Ruthian heights as Bonds has reached — not only beefing up muscles, but speeding up the reflexes of an athlete who, in the course of nature, should be slowing down. Some of Bonds’s seven Most Valuable Player awards should have gone to the Most Valuable Drug.

Bonds now admits he took steroids, but he insists he didn’t know what they were. Not since Bill Clinton in his prime has anyone asked so much credulity of the American public.

Reaching for glory, Bonds has achieved infamy. Every new record he sets from now on will deserve, and get, jeers. The most honored player in baseball has turned out to be the most dishonorable.

Poor Roger Maris! In 1961 he was hated for threatening Babe Ruth’s season home run record of 60. Maris broke the record honestly; it wasn’t his fault that the league had expanded, lengthened the season from 154 to 162 games, and thinned out the pitching talent he had to face. Most of the game’s best hitters enjoyed an unusually good year in 1961.

[Breaker quote: Statistics can't measure the difference.]

[Breaker quote: Statistics can't measure the difference.]

But Ford Frick, commissioner of Major League Baseball, suggested in mid season that if Maris hit more than 60 homers during the eight-game extension, the record book should somehow distinguish his feat from Ruth’s. Maris’s record, set on the last day of the season, was ever after cursed with a mythical “asterisk.” Surpassing Ruth brought him fame, but not much glory.

Henry Aaron showed that if you hit .300 with 44 home runs and 100 runs batted in long enough, you’ll eventually break your share of lifetime records, including Ruth’s. Bonds might have done likewise; he had the natural talent. But when he passes Ruth’s 714 homers next May, it will be baseball’s December 7 — a date that will live in infamy.

Ruth himself changed the game without performance-enhancing substances. On the contrary, he specialized in performance-depressing substances, which by the way were illegal during most of his career. Heaven knows what he might have done if he’d been an apostle of clean living.

Since I’m confessing my sins, I’m also guilty of belittling Ruth’s records by attributing many of his home runs to the short right-field fence, built with him in mind, at Yankee Stadium. One reader refutes this by pointing out that Ruth hit almost exactly as many of his 714 blasts on the road as at home. I was wildly wrong.

The Babe’s claim to be the greatest player ever is further supported by the fact that he began his career as a brilliant pitcher (94-46, with a 2.28 ERA), until his unprecedented power-hitting mandated a shift to the outfield, where he could play every day. His greatness as a hitter may have prevented him from reaching the Hall of Fame as a southpaw.

Ruth is Bonds’s opposite in another respect: He brought joy to the game. His genial, madcap personality made him one of the most beloved figures in sports history. Even the apocryphal legends that sprang up around him reflected the kind of man he was. He remains one of America’s happy memories.

Bonds is the anti-Ruth. He isn’t larger than life, merely larger than he used to be, before he discovered what the Wall Street Journal calls “better hitting through chemistry.” He can’t claim the excuse of a tough childhood: He’s the son of a major-leaguer — and the godson of a joyous Hall-of-Famer, Willie Mays, none of whose ebullience has rubbed off on Bonds’s sullen personality.

Ruth did have a tough childhood, much of it spent in a Catholic orphanage, from which he emerged grateful, if not altogether corrigible. But for all his sins, when he died, millions wept. That will probably be the final difference between him and Barry Bonds.

Joseph Sobran

Copyright © 2004 by the Griffin Internet Syndicate,
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