Bonds Bonanza

Many Barry Bonds developments:

1.  Bud Selig announces he will now try to attend the Bonds home run #756 game.  Interesting reversal including the statement (from the Olympian):

“Out of respect for the tradition of this game, the magnitude of the record, and the fact that all citizens in this country are innocent until proven guilty, I will attend Barry Bonds’ next games to observe his potential tying and breaking of the home run record, subject to my commitments to the Hall of Fame this weekend.

Why the sudden flight into constitutional law?  While it is true that in a court of law, citizens are presumed innocent until found guilty MLB is not a court of law.

2.  BALCO chemist Patrick Arnold in an interview with Bob Costas says he believes Barry Bonds and Gary Sheffield took anabolic steroids.  The New York Times carries the story.

Patrick Arnold, a chemist who worked with  the Bay Area Laboratory Co-operative, said in an HBO Sports interview that Barry Bonds and Gary Sheffield took performance-enhancing drugs provided to them by the laboratory, according to a transcript of the “Costas Now” show released yesterday.

Bonds and Sheffield have denied knowingly using drugs provided by Balco, and told that to a federal grand jury investigating the laboratory, according to leaked testimony. Bonds remains under investigation over concerns about his testimony.

Arnold is widely credited with creating “the clear,” a previously undetectable steroid that Balco provided to athletes. In 2006, he pleaded guilty to conspiring to distribute steroids, and was sentenced to three months in prison and three months of home confinement. He was among five people convicted in the case. As part of his plea agreement, he did not have to name athletes and coaches to whom he supplied drugs.

The HBO interview was scheduled to be shown last night. Arnold told Bob Costas, the show’s host, that he never met Bonds but often heard Balco’s founder, Victor Conte, raving about Bonds’s performance on “the program.”

When asked by Costas if “the program” included steroids, Arnold said: “I have a very strong feeling about it since he was on the program. And like everyone else, the program consisted of the clear.”

Very strong indictment of the players.  What about Shef's defensive statement last week?

When asked about Sheffield’s recent statement that he never took steroids because “they are something you shoot in your butt,” Arnold said: “That’s an ignorant statement. That’s some sort of weird rationalization. No, he took steroids. This is a bona fide anabolic steroid.”

3.  Over at Deadspin, Bonds' biographer Jeff Pearlman gives a must-read interview.  (after the jump)

 

The following answer to Will Leitch's question marks the most important four paragraphs to appear on this subject of Bonds and PEDs:

Few people have researched Bonds more than you have. Do YOU want him to break the record?

Here's the truth. I set out to write a fair, honest, balanced biography of a misunderstood legend. I did my absolute best, and the result is a book that I'm very proud of. I've received strong reviews, in part because I didn't take sides. Now that I'm well beyond the researching and writing; now that I'm beyond the promotional, 20-second soundbite push, I feel liberated to express my conclusion of the whole experience.

It is this: Barry Bonds is evil.

Alongside Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa, he is responsible for the illegal, unethical tattering of the most important page of the baseball record book. I grew up knowing what 755 meant. Hell, my mom--who knows nothing about sports--understands 755. I hate--absolutely, positively hate--that Barry Bonds is doing this. I'm mad if my 6-year-old nephew cheats in first grade. So for Bonds to come along and cheat to surpass Aaron--it's criminal. I read writers like Bill Rhoden and Dave Zirin--guys I respect--and I just don't understand what the hell they're doing. They maintain there's no proof that Bonds used, so how can we condemn him? If we used that mode of thinking in day-to-day life, there'd be no need for juries. You either catch a person in the act of committing a crime or he's innocent. Factually--and I mean, 100% factually--Bonds used, and the evidence is overwhelming. Game of Shadows, my book, his ties to Greg Anderson and Victor Conte, the expansion (impossible, unless he used HGH or suffers from Acromegaly) of his skull, a former teammate like Jay Canizaro telling me how Anderson said he can design a steroid cocktail for him that would be just like Barry's, so on and so on. Every time someone writes that there's no "proof," he/she is gifting the designers of masking agents. If we reward and praise the cheaters in sports, what are we saying to the kids who follow the games? What are we saying about decency and integrity?

I don't root against Bonds because he's a bad man. I root against him because he's a dishonest one. For me personally, this isn't an issue of race or class or status. It's an issue of someone taking the game I truly love and making a mockery of the whole thing.