We've learned nothing

I watched a lot of ESPN today, and the reaction to Barry Bonds has made me utterly depressed. It's hard to believe I'm saying this, but the way the press and especially fans have been bending over backwards to make excuses for this guy and excuses for themselves ("I know I shouldn't enjoy this, but...") suggests that we've really learned nothing from the steroid era. So allow me a moment to have a little fun beating on some mostly straw men.

1) "This is America. He's innocent until proven guilty."
Perhaps I've been watching a bit too much Nancy Grace lately, but what a copout. You can't use this argument when you're debating something that will never be argued in a court of law. If Barry's case were brought to trial, I don't think he'd fare too well. After all, there's at least one book I know of that is full of carefully researched evidence of what he did. And then there's the leaked grand jury testimony in which he admits to using banned substances (unknowingly), the suspicious numbers (that 73 at age 36 sticks out like a sore thumb) and his almost unbelievable change in physique (which might not be so convincing had his head not grown along with the rest of him). I mean, his connections to BALCO, the trainer who's in jail...you can say "he's innocent until proven guilty," but no informed person can argue that he's innocent with a straight face, failed test or no (no comprehensive testing policy, HGH, etc.)

(Not long ago, I heard Stephen A. Smith argue that because the evidence is so convincing, the fact that baseball hasn't banned him suggests that he's innocent. I guess Stephen A. thinks he's too guilty to be guilty. Who keeps putting this guy on the air?)

2) "So he did steroids. So what? This is the steroids era. He was the best player of the steroids era--maybe the best of all time whether he cheated or not--and he's still going to the Hall of Fame either way."
I can buy this argument when we're comparing Bonds with the likes of McGwire, Sosa, etc. Barry Bonds does not deserve the indignity of getting twenty-something percent of the Hall of Fame vote. He deserves to get in on the first ballot. But when you start stacking him up against players from other eras who did not have access to the same illegal science, that's where the injustice comes in. And the moral question is bigger than numbers you can add or subtract and compare. I read an analogy somewhere that I quite liked: this defense is like if Bill Gates robbed a bank and you argued you couldn't punish him because he would have made all that money anyway.

3) "You're never going to get a level playing field anyway. The balls are juiced, expansion has watered down pitching--and on the other hand, you've got more talent from around the world, righty/lefty bullpen specialists. The level playing field is unattainable."
Though there are statistical tools which account for different "eras" in baseball, it is true that a "dumb" number like home runs is not the best possible metric for comparing two players from different eras. But there is a difference between uniform changes across the entire game (fiddling around with the mound, more teams, different balls, etc.) and the moral responsibility Bonds has to take for doing illegal things to give himself an unfair advantage over his peers and his contemporaries. My worry is that this will to do to the career record what McGwire and then Bonds did to the single-season record. 61 and 755 used to be the two biggest numbers in sports. Now what does 61 mean? For that matter, what does 73 mean? Did you even know that 73 is the record now? (before I looked it up, I couldn't remember if it was 71, 73 or 75)

4) "Who's to say that Aaron didn't cheat? Greenies have been around forever."
When this straw man is brought up, people usually don't have the balls to invoke the Holy Aaron's name. They only make the implication by bringing up the drug and the era. Which is the point, since there's no evidence Aaron cheated--or if there is, I don't know about it, and there is no Game of Shadows detailing anything like that surrounding Aaron.

5) "Who cares. This was history. Steroids or no, he did an awesome thing, and it may never happen again in our lifetime, so let's enjoy it for what it is."
This is the worst one of all. We haven't learned from this kind of attitude the first time? Standing there slack-jawed and clapping reflexively because home runs sure are neato is exactly what got baseball into this mess in the first place. If we bury our heads in the sand and refuse to critically examine the full circumstances of the steroid era, then we'll never get anywhere and baseball will just keep repeating the same mistakes. We can't pin down exactly what steroids did for the guy and we can't take his record away, but we can't just accept it either, or else we lose the moral authority to say anything about anyone else who gets caught cheating. The willful ignorance of overlooking steroids in the interest of some kind of pure appreciation of the moment only dooms us to the kind of complacency that let the situation spin out of control back when we had the chance to fix it the first time. Obviously, baseball has made tremendous strides in its testing program, but there's still a long way to go, and accepting what Bonds has done only makes the league's efforts to clean up even more hollow.