Barry Bonds continues on his steroid/HGH/insulin fueled home run rampage to catch Hank Aaron. Bonds has survived BALCO, income tax evasion suspicions, perjury, the jailing of his trainer, amphetamine use, age and injury. Can anything stop him?
Apparently Rick Sutcliffe could. Story here in the Lincoln Currier.
The antidote for Barry Bonds is Rick Sutcliffe. The trouble is that Sutcliffe is retired.
No pitcher has faced Bonds more often without yielding a home run. No man has tempted fate so frequently and so favorably. In 51 career plate appearances against Sutcliffe, Bonds produced two measly RBI and struck out nine times.
Granted, all of these confrontations preceded Bonds' midcareer metamorphosis, his physical transformation from a sleek athlete to a bulging biology experiment. So maybe an asterisk is appropriate.
Sutcliffe threw his last competitive pitch in 1994, before Bonds struck 476 of his 735 home runs and long before Ken Caminiti's confession, Mark McGwire's credibility meltdown on Capitol Hill and the whole BALCO brouhaha.
Like others, this author is disturbed by the artificial push behind the new assault on the hallowed record:
Bonds is hardly alone here. McGwire, Sammy Sosa, Jose Canseco and Rafael Palmeiro certainly share responsibility for distorting the game's standards (as do the artificially enhanced pitchers who have corrupted the competition and largely escaped scrutiny). Yet because Bonds has achieved more and befriended fewer than his most notable contemporaries, and because he will start this season just 21 home runs shy of Aaron's record, he bears the brunt of our bewilderment.
Pandora's box has been flung open, and there's no closing it now. We can't roll back the clock to a more innocent age or create two sets of statistics based on presumed innocence and assumed guilt. We're basically stuck with what steroids wrought.
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