E-Mail This Article to a Friend How will history treat Barry Bonds? BY CHRISTOPHER YOUNG

San Francisco Giants outfielder Barry Bonds will enter this season — his 19th — just three career home runs from passing his godfather, Willie Mays (660 career round-trippers), on the career home-run list, with the mighty Babe Ruth’s 714 homers as the next milestone. If he continues at the pace he’s been on (and if he stays healthy), Bonds could pass the Bambino’s mark early next season, and perhaps break Hank Aaron’s all-time HR record of 755 midway through the 2006 season, albeit at age 41 or 42. Coincidentally, when Aaron retired from the game after 23 productive seasons, he was also 42 and deservedly headed for a first-ballot Hall of Fame berth in Cooperstown.

Will Barry Bonds receive his due credit and accolades if and when he passes Ruth and Aaron? Hard to tell. Bonds is a Hall-of-Famer without question, but whether his statistical accomplishments will be viewed in the same untarnished manner as have the Babe’s and Hammerin’ Hank’s will forever be discussed.

Steroid use first came into prominence in the field of bodybuilding back in the ’70s, and shortly thereafter became popular within other team sports that required strength and power. It has been claimed that chemical enhancers were frequently used by interior linemen in the National Football League (and supposedly contributed to the death of former Broncos defensive lineman Lyle Alzado), and later by baseball players that wanted to bump up their power numbers to secure a roster spot. Crackdowns on steroids in both football and baseball have been forthcoming lately, although the NFL’s punitive measures are thus far much stronger than those of baseball (though MLB continues its anti-steroid stance and vows to ultimately eliminate them from the game through random testing).

Steroids certainly created an uneven playing field among the brutes that played on the offensive and defensive lines in the NFL, and while their use undoubtedly helped enhance the résumés of some future Hall of Famers, statistics compiled from linemen participating in the NFL are not deemed quite as critical to the history of the game as are totals accumulated by Major League Baseball players. Baseball is all about statistics, whether it be strikeouts, ERA, extra-base hits, and certainly, the most coveted one: home runs. And as Bonds approaches the career-HR mark, the specter of steroid use continues to hang over him, thereby forcing observers of the sport to look with a jaded eye at Bonds’s numbers and accomplishments.

Bonds has continued to deny ever using performance-enhancing drugs, although he has been suspected of such use ever since his home-run numbers started to escalate — culminating with his record-breaking 2001 season when he cranked out 73 dingers to establish the single-season record. And while Bonds has collected "only" 46 and 45 home runs respectively over the past two seasons, the spotlight of skepticism returned to the 39-year-old slugger this past off-season when his personal trainer became enmeshed in a controversy surrounding BALCO Labs, reportedly a Bay Area clearinghouse for designer performance-enhancing drugs. Allegations that the trainer, Greg Anderson, had visited the Giants’ clubhouse to distribute the steroid THG to some clients is at the heart of the suspicion surrounding the Giants’ left fielder, along with Anderson’s indictment (along with three others) and the grand-jury testimony provided by 12 athletes (including Bonds). Bonds continues to assert that he has never taken THG or any other steroid, and last week two lawyers for the defendants stated that Bonds was offered the designer drug by Anderson, but refused to take it.

Bonds’s records, along with the accomplishments of other suspected steroid users like Mark McGwire, the Cubs’ Sammy Sosa, and the Yankees’ Jason Giambi, are being closely scrutinized because the records that those players broke were so long in place — only to be broken rapid-fire within a four-season period at the turn of this past century. While former major-leaguers Ken Caminiti and Jose Canseco have written exposés of their own steroid use and continue to claim that use of the prohibited drugs is rampant in the majors, that doesn’t mean that Bonds or Sosa or Giambi are equally guilty. Caminiti was the first to break the story in a Sports Illustrated piece a couple of years ago, and his revelations confirmed what many had suspected about the Houston Astros infielder. Between 1991 and 1993, Caminiti hit 13 round-trippers during each of those three seasons, but in subsequent years his HR totals increased, highlighted by his 40-HR NL MVP season in 1996. Injury problems began to dog him, though, and after home-run totals of 26 and 29 in ’97 and ’98 respectively, his productivity diminished and he retired in 2001. The physical woes that ultimately derailed Caminiti’s career are often indicative of steroid use, and that’s why some believe that the 38-year-old McGwire retired prematurely — just three years after shattering Roger Maris’s home-run record of 61 in 1998 with his remarkable 70-HR campaign. McGwire’s good-guy image and consistent power numbers would seem to belie those suspicions, but the fact remains that Big Mac’s HR numbers rose from 39 to 52 to 58 to 70 in just four seasons, and Maris’s record had stood for nearly 40 seasons before McGwire and Sosa staged their memorable summer-long home-run derby in ’98.

Sosa’s physique and power numbers also dramatically bulked up in the late ’90s, and while his 1998 total of 66 home runs was overshadowed by McGwire’s performance, that number still broke Maris’s existing record by five. More important, that total represented an upgrade of 30 home runs from the 36 that the affable Dominican had smacked the previous season for the Cubs.

But as mentioned, Caminiti and Canseco both rolled the dice and engaged in steroid use but ultimately paid the price by injury-shortened careers and confessions that their career statistics should forever have asterisks attached. Bonds and Sosa have rarely missed significant time due to injury, and though their personalities sit on opposite sides of the spectrum, both have continued to produce despite being under a cloud of suspicion, and have strongly maintained their innocence.

Bonds is rightfully disliked by fans and media alike for his perceived arrogance and often rude behavior toward them. I wholeheartedly admit that I have never been firmly in his corner either: frankly, he’s a jerk. Yet I am (reluctantly) leaning toward supporting him because prominently framing this discussion are more important points: he is apparently a good teammate, an upstanding family man, and a charitable proponent, and the power numbers that he has achieved over the years have been remarkably consistent — his stupendous 2001 season notwithstanding. Sure, Bonds was a much skinnier version of the man we now see during his breakout years with the Pirates, but maybe it was a combination of hard work, diet, and fruitful exercise regimens that propelled him to the top of his craft. After all, since 1993, when he came to the Bay Area via free agency, his home-run totals have been 46, 37 (in 112 games in the strike-shortened season), 33, 42, 40, 37, 34 (in 102 games), 49, 73, 46, and 45. During that time Bonds has become the most feared and prolific slugger in the game, as evidenced by his base-on-balls total that dwarfs any other current major-leaguer’s. Sometime this season, Bonds will likely break Rickey Henderson’s all-time walks record, and Bonds additionally established single-season marks for most BBs in the record-breaking 2001 season (177) and again the following season (a stupefying 198). Add to those totals the fact that Bonds is a six-time National League MVP and an eight-time Gold Glover, and what you come up with is a man who is, like him or not, as complete a ballplayer as you will find in the game, and one whose remarkable accomplishments (too many to list here) are apparently a testament to hard work, rather than to chemical enhancements.

Bonds is starting to get up there in years, and whether he can even attain the career home-run record is dependent on many mitigating factors, but it’s tough to tag him with the "Yeah-but" label when the only evidence you have to the contrary is one 73-HR season (which remains the lone season in which he hit over 50 in a season) and a sculpted physique.

Barry Bonds is not an easy person to like, and in many respects, the way he carries himself in the eyes of fandom and the beat writers exemplifies all that is wrong with spoiled athletes. A lot of folks may well want to attach an asterisk if Bonds breaks Ruth’s and then Aaron’s long-ball record, since it seems impossible that any one player can be so damn good for so damn long without a little bit of help.

But tough as it is for me to proclaim his innocence and toast his remarkable career, unless evidence is submitted that Bonds has been lying to us for all these many years about his steroid abstinence, then we will have to take him at his word — and continue to marvel at the man’s accomplishments.

After all, our kids and grandkids might someday be asking about Barry Bonds in the same fashion that we asked our own grandpas about the great Babe Ruth, and we should be grateful that as baseball fans we had a front-row seat to witness the modern-day Sultan of Swat’s greatness.

Sporting Eye runs Mondays and Fridays at BostonPhoenix.com, and Christopher Young can be reached at cyoung[a]phx.com