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Barry Bonds: Worthy of the Record?
By Andrew McCarten, TheSportsStand.com (6/25/07)

Barry Bonds currently has 749 career home runs. Barring an MLB strike, a crazy fan or a catastrophic knee injury, he will mostly likely break Hank Aaron’s hallowed all time home run record of 755.But the real question baseball fans from Toronto to Tampa debating is does he deserve it? Some will tell you that he is a cheater and the record will never truly be his. Some would point to the fact that virtually every long-baller of the last 15 years has come under scrutiny for possible steroid use. Even a nearly blind person can see that Bonds’s body size has changed dramatically from his rookie year in 1986, in which he hit a mediocre 16 homers for the Pirates as a lead off hitter, to his present figure. Some fans who have seats in left field in games where Bonds plays can’t even see the plate!

Everyone knows the story of Bonds’s alleged steroid use. His trainer, Greg Anderson, was brought in to court in 2003 on chargers of supplying athletes with anabolic steroids. The highly controversial Book of Shadows was released, and the two authors refused to tell where they got their sources from, with information coming from a supposedly sealed grand jury testimony. But he has turned an oblivious back to it all, withdrawing from the MLBPA, which is why he isn’t in your video games, and basically becoming a million dollar hermit of a man.

So, in the end, baseball fans will look back on the day that Bonds hit number 756 with either fondness or hatred. If it’s a home game, he will hear roars from the crowd as he rounds the bases. If he’s in an opposing park, the boos, among other things, will rain down as he trots the record-breaking 360 feet. In the end, most baseball fans will learn to live with the record and probably still refer to Hank Aaron as the “real home run champion." But the real interesting part will be the way Bonds handles it. Yes, baseball fans will get over it eventually. But will Barry Bonds be in anguish because he really never did take steroids, or he knows he cheated America’s pastime?

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