Cody
Williams
Barry Bonds: Beyond the Babe
Hank
Aaron’s 755 career home runs are a Major League Baseball record.
Babe Ruth’s 714 home runs are not.
Yet major league baseball fans who crowd into parks from Boston to the Bay Area of California have set Ruth’s number as the benchmark all sandlot dreams are supposed to be based on and all big league careers measured against. Aaron’s greater accomplishment is mentioned only as an “and then there’s…,” almost as an afterthought. Ruth invariably emerges as the great white, albeit dead, hope defining America’s pastime, draping the game in nostalgic lore, untarnished by scandal, drug use and unfair competitive advantages.
Let’s not kid ourselves. Let’s call a spade a spade. Every aspect of American living is filtered through a color sieve. The problem a lot of baseball fans have with Barry Bonds eclipsing Ruth’s mark has as much to do with the color of his skin as it does with a BALCO operative allegedly injecting steroids into his ass muscle with a syringe. (From what I know you can’t just rub that stuff on as a topical cream, Barry.)
Some folks argue that if Bonds sets a new home run record the fact should go down in the record books with an asterisk next to it to show future generations his achievement was accomplished with an unfair advantage.
Reported throughout the sports world was the gleeful display of a ragtag banner by fans in, of all places, the City of Brotherly Love, Philadelphia’s “Citizens Bank Park” this week that asked the question, “Babe did it on beer and hotdogs, Aaron with class, how do you do it?” It was a reference to Bonds’ allegedly steroid aided performance. Sports pundits have maligned as ‘egotistical’ Bonds and compared him to the ‘Bambino’s’ magnanimous charitable contributions and make-a dying-child’s-wish-come-true iconic legend. Bonds, on the other hand they write, has the nerve to allow ESPN to air a reality show based on his quest to achieve Bambino greatness and how he is often curt with the media who dog him for any utterance.
Of Ruth, on the day in 1919 after he was sold to the New York Yankees his former boss, the Boston Red Sox owner Harry Frazee said at a press conference:
"It would be impossible to start next season with Ruth and have a smooth-working machine. Ruth had become simply impossible, and the Boston club could no longer put up with his eccentricities. I think the Yankees are taking a gamble. While Ruth is undoubtedly the greatest hitter the game has ever seen, he is likewise one of the most selfish and inconsiderate men ever to put on a baseball uniform."
Off the field Ruth was known as a hard living, booze guzzling, womanizer. (Barry cheated on his wife too). Ruth’s financial demands almost bankrupted a team that, like all 1918 baseball, was suffering from low ball park attendance because a whole lot of would be fans were overseas dying in the battlefields of World War I.
Who really needs a hero anyway? Just let ‘em play ball.
Has Bonds used steroids? Well, if the bronze slugger had performed at the same level throughout his entire 21 year career as he has in the three years since the steroids accusations began, he would not be closing in on the Babe’s 714 mark he would have doubled it by now.
I’ve gained 15 lbs since the federal ban on ephedrine. The Chinese herb gave me the energy boost I needed to even want to do my three mile jogs three times a week.
Times have changed a lot since the proceeds earned from fans eager to see Ruth play help to build Yankee Stadium. Ball clubs are owned and run like corporations, not for the love of the game but for the pursuit of profits. Stadiums were once known by the teams who played in them: Yankee, Tiger and Dodger, or by a place, a city or one of its stalwarts: Three River, Candlestick, Fennway. Today their names are a part of a marketing strategy designed to help make a corporation make money: AT&T Park, Comamerica Park and Tropicana Park.
(Those just don’t sound like “Fields of Dreams” to me.)
Whatever Bonds took to acquire his superhuman strength so late in his career has worked to pump new money into otherwise sagging coffers. His team, the Giants is not ranked among the league’s best. Yet their home games nearly sellout with fans beaming with the anticipation of watching, or catching, each ball Bonds shatters into his personal best category. Even the Giants’ away games pack in spectators whose major interest in the major league is to boo and jeer at Barry.
Barry’s doping, if it is that, has been good for business, one need only to look at the ratings of ESPN’s coverage of him.
With what we know about Babe Ruth’s character can any of us say he too would not have taken Bonds’ route to greatness and immortality? Would white America have booed him, or would he still be the icon he is today? We haven’t seen Mark McGwire burned in effigy have we?
Anabolic steroids have harmful side effects and we don’t want to encourage our children to use them. But they also helped Ben Johnson run faster than any human being had ever at the time. And think about the excitement generated by the juiced up McGwire vs Sammy Sosa slugfest.
Major League Baseball authenticates the baseballs pitched to Bonds whose homers can sell for hundreds of thousands of dollars on the memorabilia market.
Where there is money to be made and bragging rights to be gained, somebody is going to take advantage of the opportunities presented them and capitalize on it. And folks will pay for the entertainment and follow the crowd in heaping on them adulation or ridicule, whichever is the prevailing whim.
Bonds complains of not being accepted by the press and about being maligned in the media. Ah, the poor little rich guy. The shocker for Barry, as was the case for O.J. and Michael Jackson before him, is the sobering reality that no matter the privileges you may have been born into, no matter what talents given to you at birth, no matter the hard work and sweat you put into becoming the best at what you do, no matter how blond the girl that bore your children, no matter how pretty you sing and twirl, how fast you run and high you jump or how far you can slug a baseball beyond the outfield, much of white America is all to quick to remind you that to them, you will always be nothing but a black man.
It’s time we and major league baseball move beyond Babe Ruth as legend.
What Barry Bonds, Hank Aaron, Tiger Woods and Michael Jordan have shown the world is that the entire first half of last century when the game was played deserves an asterisk. It is clear that some of the world’s most talented and able men were kept out of competition solely because of the color of their skin. Call a spade a spade. Those white men who were allowed to play and set the records players today are judged by did so with an unfair advantage.
© www.codywilliams.com 2006
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