For The Record, Part 1

This is the first of two articles reflecting on Barry Bonds' becoming baseball's all-time home run king.

I saw the dinger.

THE dinger.

Number 756.

Any way you say it, the number demands a certain respect.

And yet, I find myself feeling weird right now.

Not ambivalent, but weird.

There's just something wrong when such a colossal indignity is committed publicly and nothing is done about it.

While something may yet be done is really immaterial. After all, no matter what the NCAA and the Big Ten may say about Michigan's tainted records with the Fab Five, we all saw freshmen play in the NCAA Championship Game. All the money that any boosters might have given them didn't make them better players, only richer. We saw them. They existed. Their deeds occurred in real life. We have chosen to ignore their deeds because of off-court malfeasance, but that's really it, isn't it?

We choose to ignore what really happened.

In other words, we're trying to edit reality.

Barry Bonds, most certainly chemically-enhanced, really hit his 756th career home run.

I will not recount the evidence against him, mountainous though it is.

All I can say is that, whatever we may choose to do with his record, it is now finally his, now and forever.

Any future discussion of home run kings will inevitably have to mention him, because, love him or hate him, he still had to face major league pitching and hit the baseball out of the yard 756 times, more than anyone else.

An asterisk only tempts us to alter reality, just like the asterisk that haunted Roger Maris to his death. The fact is that Maris hit more home runs than Babe Ruth in a season, number of games be damned. Maris didn't make the schedule, any more than Ruth did. Maris actually stood in and hit 61 home runs in a single season, more than any man before him and any man up to the benighted Mark McGwire.

When that asterisk was finally removed, we admitted what we already knew all along: Maris had really done what we had all seen him do.

Just as Pete Rose has done what we have all seen him do, some 4256 times. Rose's eligibility for the National Baseball Hall of Fame really doesn't matter, because the record he posted is unlikely to ever be broken. We can make him persona non grata at official baseball events, we can keep him from ever darkening the Hall's door, but his presence looms over the Hall because his record stands.

He actually hit a baseball safely 4256 times. There's only one other guy that has as many as 4000 career hits, and only one other guy after him that has as many as 3700 career hits.

This is where we are with Barry Bonds. We can choose not to put his records in the books, just like we do for Sadaharu Oh and Josh Gibson. In Gibson's case, we choose not to acknowledge his records because the white, er, right people didn't see them...never mind ample eyewitness testimony to the contrary. In Oh's case, his were only hit in Japan...as though hitting 800+ home runs in Japan is somehow easier than hitting 714 against competition that didn't include black pitchers.

I mean, it's too late for any recriminations now. It's too late to take anything back.

What? Are we going to go back through every one of Barry Bonds' home runs and magically erase them from the box score? Are we going to change the scores of the games in which those home runs occurred?

Let's not forget that all of those home runs did not occur in a vacuum, but within the context of a major league baseball season, which usually ends with a champion, absent Bud Selig's thumb-fingered interference. Bonds' teams haven't always been as bad as the current edition. What do we do to some deserving team that got cheated out of a victory because of a Bonds blast?

Send them roses? Offer an apology? Do some fantasy league crap and retroactively award them the playoff spot they didn't get because Bonds was hitting out of his mind for a chemically-enhanced season or two?

No, these 756 home runs really happened, because baseball let them happen.

And baseball let them happen because we let baseball let them happen.

Had we stood up and been counted, had we spoken with our wallets instead of our handwritten signs, this might have been averted.

Instead, we supported this charade. The more he hit, the more of us came to the yard and bought his jersey and signed up for the baseball package on our local cable providers and bought products advertised on baseball broadcasts...and Major League Baseball took note.

So they gave him a pass.

Instead of keeping him from the pinnacle of baseball records, they paved the way for him. Baseball drug its heels at ever investigating steroids, despite growing evidence that the drug was everywhere, then appointed a toothless investigator with no subpoena power to "look into the matter."

All that was a sham. All that was for our benefit.

Baseball only gave us what we wanted...then, and now.

Then, we wanted commercials that said "Chicks dig the long ball."

Now, we'll want asterisks...or expunged records...or some other equally faux punishment for things that really happened.

Barry Bonds has really hit 756 home runs.

This ain't the Matrix. We can't alter reality.

He really did it.

And it is our fault.