I am a Giants fan. And I am not ashamed.

I am a Giants fan, and I am not ashamed.

Anyone who calls himself a baseball fan has had to come to terms with the steroid era.  Guys we liked, guys we cheered for, were cheaters.  That’s the meme; that’s how it’s presented, that’s the rhetoric of PEDs.  In every other sport, steroids carry with them the stigma of disgrace.  Olympic athletes compete, and then they pee in a cup, and if their test is positive, they’re disgraced publicly, their medals stripped from them, their reputations irreparably tarnished.  Lance Armstrong isn’t just a great cyclist. He’s a cyclist about whom there are questions. 

But we’re Giants’ fans.  We didn’t just root for a cheater.  We rooted for the worst cheater of them all, the most brazen cheater in all of sports: Barry Lamar Bonds, the one player, above all others, who defined the steroid era.  Not only the best player in baseball, but the greatest offensive force in the history of baseball played on our favorite team, for fourteen years.  The record book tells one story.  Game of Shadows tells another.  And because of that book, and BALCO, and the legal proceedings, we know more about Barry Bonds than we know about any other player implicated in steroid use.  To the degree that records achieved with the aid of steroids are tainted, Barry Bonds’ records bear that taint.  The most preposterous statistical record ever accumulated by a major league baseball player was the result of talent, yes, and discipline, yes, and hard work and sacrifice, yes.  And also the cream and the clear. 

That’s our guy.  We rooted for him.  We defended him, some of us.  We didn’t quit being Giants’ fans when it all came out.  Shame on us.  Shame on us all.

Well, I don’t feel ashamed and I don’t feel embarrassed.  And I’m not going to stick my head in the sand and pretend that it didn’t happen, or attack Fainaru-Wada and Williams, or say ‘hey, he never tested positive,’ or use any of those defenses.  Instead, I want to locate Barry Bonds historically, try to understand just who Barry Bonds was and what his achievements really do mean.  I think history, if approached with some rigor, can lead to understanding.  Ty Cobb was a great baseball player; he’s not a bad historical parallel with Bonds, in some ways.  Well, everyone knows who Ty Cobb was.  He was a racist, he was a vicious creep, he was a borderline sociopath; Bill James, in the first edition of his Historical Abstract, suggested Cobb was barely human.  Then we learned more.  James learned more.  And a more complex, more thoughtful, more compassionate, more rounded, more human picture has emerged. 

In a professional baseball clubhouse, players face, above all, one overriding imperative: to do whatever you can to improve your professional abilities.  If you’re injured, you work hard at rehab, if you’re in a slump, you take extra batting practice and watch extra video of your at bats, if they’re sitting on your fastball, you develop other pitches, if there’s even the tiniest chance you might be asked to play another position than the one you normally play, you take extra infield practice.  Locker room culture reinforces this imperative, through kangaroo courts and through good natured ribbing—which always carries a bit of an edge--and sometimes, through direct confrontation.  Players will stand by their teammates publically, but they’ll let a guy know if he’s not pulling his weight. 

This culture of continual improvement is probably more pronounced in baseball than in other professional team sports, because baseball is institutionally unique ; ballclubs have farm systems.  Baseball has invented the most brutally efficient, ferociously competitive means of identifying, winnowing and refining talent the sports world has ever seen.  Major league players are the triumphant survivors of a system in which any weakness can destroy you.  The locker room culture that inevitably emerges is the ultimate adaptation to a frantically hostile environment. 

Barry Bonds was, like all ballplayers, a triumphant survivor of that system.   But what we sometimes forget is that Barry Bonds grew up in that environment.  In fact, I don’t think it’s an accident that a disproportionate number of ballplayers’ kids end up making it to the majors.  In Moneyball, one of the things that attracts Billy Beane to Nick Swisher is the fact that his Dad played in the big leagues.  He’s already acculturated.  People often talk about Barry as a locker room cancer; he had three lockers, he had the big armchair, he couldn’t remember Aaron Rowand’s first name.  Maybe so.  A lot of professional athletes are raised in an atmosphere of entitlement; it makes some of them real jerks.  Most players also come from lower to lower/middle class backgrounds; their sense of entitlement comes from being good at something most of us would love to be good at, so we cut the guys who really are good at it some slack. But Barry was, for most of his childhood, a rich kid: private schools, all the toys he wanted.  Add ‘spoiled ballplayer’ to ‘spoiled rich kid,’ and it’s not surprising you end up with a brat. And that’s Barry.  There are times he can be kind of a brat.

 But Barry Bonds wasn’t just the son of a ballplayer.  He was the son of Bobby Bonds.  And Bobby was really pretty unique.  Highly intelligent, brilliantly talented, strangely flawed, Bobby Bonds was a player years ahead of his time.  He was a superb outfielder, a terrific baserunner.  As a hitter, he had the ultimate Three True Outcomes approach.  Every year, from 1968 to 1981, he drew a ton of walks, hit lots of homers, and struck out.  In an era where batting average was seen as the most important statistical measure of a player’s success, he was a disappointing player, a Great Talent who never became the star he should have been.  His was a peripatetic career, from ’75 to ’81, he was traded every year except one.  This is the one that amazes me: after the 1975 season, the New York Yankees decided they just didn’t need a twenty nine year old corner outfielder who’d put up a .270/.375/.512 line in the toughest park in the American League for a right handed power hitter.  Traded him to the Angels for Mickey Rivers and Ed Figueroa.  How would we see him today, a guy who put up an OPS+ over 100 for 11 straight years?  How was he seen in his day?  As a guy who you had to bat leadoff despite his power, because he just struck out too much to bat .300, like good hitters did.

That was Bobby Bonds, not a Hall of Famer, but a terrific player who was undervalued through most of his career, a bright guy, who was respected by his teammates for his work ethic and attitude, but who was forever disappointing his managers and GM’s.  Therefore, a guy who could be forgiven for having a certain disdain for baseball’s conventional wisdom.  And, of course, the single most important formative influence on his son Barry.  So it’s hardly surprising that Barry didn’t do a lot of things the way other people did.  Including steroids.

Point One: Baseball bats are made of ash.  Have been since 1884, when Bud Hillerich sat at his lathe and made an ash bat for Pete Browning.  Not Barry, his bats are maple.  He met Sam Holman in ’97, worked with him to devise a better bat.  And since 2001, a lot more players use maple.  73 homers will do that.

Point Two: Power hitters don’t choke up on the bat.  If you want to hit home runs, you swing from the knob.  Except  Barry, who thought he could get around on an inside fastball better if he choked up.

Point Three: there’s a longstanding culture of hustle in baseball.  You run out ground balls, you hustle down the line on fly balls; if you’re an outfielder, you hustle to field routine singles.  Not Barry.  He’d hustle if the game was on the line, but if the game wasn’t close, and someone hit a single to left, Barry would hardly even trot over to field it.  When you run hard, you risk pulling a muscle, and it’s a long season.  Barry knew that keeping his bat in the lineup was much more important than that one single getting stretched to a double.   

So when it came to steroids, it’s not surprising that Barry Bonds, once again, wasn’t like anyone else.  Jose Canseco has described the way steroids worked in most locker rooms.  A guy would ask a teammate to stick a needle in his ass.  Barry’s steroid use, on the other hand, was at BALCO, part of an intensive program of workouts and diet and weight work and drugs intended to create the perfect ballplayer.  In all his public testimony about steroids, have you noticed how Barry seems sort of baffled by it all?  Like, why does this even matter?  To him, the steroids part didn’t particularly matter.  BALCO was a lab, and Victor Conte and Greg Anderson and Patrick Arnold its mad scientists.  The cream and the clear were just part of an entire workout program individually tailored for Barry Bonds. 

And what was that about?  It was about that one overriding locker room imperative: to do whatever it took to improve.  To do whatever you had to to get better at your job.  If your arm hurts, take a cortisone shot.  Pull something, work harder at rehab.  If you’re in a slump, take extra batting practice.  Barry Bonds saw the possibility of becoming the greatest offensive force the game had ever seen.  From his father, he knew about the overriding importance of walks and power.  From the locker room culture that formed him, he was motivated to devise the perfect workout, the perfect combination of weight work and diet and running that would enhance his already supernal hand/eye coordination.

Now, there was another imperative competing with the locker room grand imperative, a social taboo against cheating, an awareness that steroids were illegal, against the rules of baseball, frowned on by society.  But when faced with two competing moral imperatives, most people choose the one closest to home, the one that’s reinforced most directly and personally.  Baseball had a rule against steroids, it’s true.  But with essentially no enforcement mechanism, no testing, no real consequences if caught, it’s inevitable that many many players would ignore it.  We don’t know how many players used steroids, of course, but I think we can assume that from the early ‘90’s on, most players were using.  Why wouldn’t they?  Everything all the other guys in the locker room were doing—all the cortisone shots and the extra batting practice and all the video watching and physical therapy—surely sent a message to many that you weren’t a good teammate if you didn’t do this too.  Given the salary structure of the game, it surely didn’t make economic sense not to. 

My least favorite meme capturing the whole moralistic response to steroids that permeates our media is the argument that ballplayers in the Good Old Days had integrity, by gum.  You didn’t see Mays and Mantle and Clemente and Aaron shooting up in their locker rooms.  No, but you did see Mickey Mantle miss a World Series because a quack shot him up with vitamins using a dirty needle.  We’ve all read Ball Four.  Players in Bouton’s era all faced the same pressures, and all resorted to the same remedy; they used illegal performance enhancing drugs when they could get their hands on them, knowing there was little chance they’d get caught.  They all used greenies.  We don’t know specifically that Willie Mays used greenies, but I wouldn’t think less of him if he did.  They were the PEDs of his era, and players took them for the same reason players took steroids.  To get better at their jobs.

Besides, baseball has always fostered a culture of good natured cheating.  Sign stealing, spitballs, phantom double plays: if you can find an edge, you exploit it.  How much of Barry Bonds’ success can be attributed to steroids?  How much of Gaylord Perry’s success can be attributed to loading up?  We don’t know the answer to either question.

What I do know is that Barry Bonds set himself a task that American society generally finds laudable.  He decided to become the very best at his profession, the best he could be, the best there ever was. He decided to disregard every other consideration to achieve that goal. And he did it. He became the greatest offensive force in the history of the game of baseball.  I was a fan, and I got to watch it, and it was something to behold. 

And I will not apologize for enjoying it.  I’m not going to throw my hands up in disgust and quit liking baseball.  I’m not going to say ‘they’re all cheats and they’re all dirty, and they’re terrible role models and to hell with ‘em.’  I’m going to tell my children that there was a unique time in baseball history, where a combination of cultural pressures, economic realities, and non-existent enforcement standards produced a generation of baseball players who made the decision to risk their health and break the law, because that was what they thought they needed to do to get really good at their jobs. And they did, and the baseball that resulted was glorious.  Tragically glorious, perhaps.  Sadly glorious, almost certainly.  But it was sure fun to watch. 

I am a San Francisco Giants fan.  For fourteen years, Barry Bonds was my favorite player.   And I will not apologize.  I am a Giants fan, and I am not ashamed.