Major League Baseball gives Bonds a tarnished crown

Major League Baseball is paying the price for decades of lax or nonexistent enforcement of a reasonable rule against steroid use by its players.

The sport’s premier record — lifetime home runs — was held by Hank Aaron for 33 years, and has been broken by a player who by any reasonable reading of his career statistics and his physical development, used some form of steroids to enhance his performance.

And as a result, when San Francisco Giant Barry Bonds hit home run No. 756 off Washington Nationals left-hander Mike Bacsik Tuesday, more fans yawned or booed than cheered. Not at the ballpark that night, of course. There most of the fans were caught up in the moment, and Giants fans have shown themselves to be especially willing to look beyond Bonds’ faults.

No such excitement

But clearly the rest of the U.S. sports world in general, and even the baseball world specifically, showed not a fraction of the interest in Bonds’ pursuit of Aaron’s record, compared to the overwhelming interest that attended Aaron’s pursuit of Babe Ruth’s record in 1974.

Nearly 15 million American homes were tuned in to NBC when Aaron hit home run No. 715 on April 8, 1974. Just 1.6 million sets were tuned to ESPN2 when Bonds hit the run that took the crown from Aaron. And more than 10 percent of those were in the Bay area.

Granted, Bonds got his home run on West Cost time — a few minutes before midnight on the East Coast — while Aaron hit his in prime time. But more was involved here than the fractured media of today — 200 channels and counting — and the difference in time zones.

Much of America is simply turned off by what they view as cheating, especially a kind of cheating that sets a dangerous example for young athletes.

While Bonds consistently denies having ever taken steroids, there is apparently some grand jury testimony and a small stack of books that say otherwise. And then there are the photographs of the young Barry Bonds who started his career in Pittsburgh and then moved to San Francisco. Compare those to the photos of the middle-aged Bonds who went through a physical transformation at the same time he reached his most prodigious years. Between the ages of 36 and 40 — that would be the 2000 through 2004 seasons — Bonds hit 258 of his career home runs.

Those are also the years during which, we now know, other Major League sluggers were enhancing their performance with steroids. And they are the years before MLB finally cracked down on steroid use.

Touch of class

Aaron, always a class act, sent a recorded message of congratulations to Bonds, which was showed on the scoreboard during Tuesday night’s celebration. Some of Bonds gear has already been sent to Cooperstown, N.Y., for display at the Hall of Fame. And the home run ball is expected to be worth hundreds of thousands of dollars to the young New York Mets fan who snagged it.

Those are the trappings of a historic accomplishment, but they cannot hide what lies beneath, the ugly message of Bonds’ bulked-up years. It is a message that goes beyond cheaters win. It’s a message that encourages young athletes to use whatever means they can, including drugs that give short-term benefits at the risk of psychological instability and later physical disability, to get an edge.

The message of Barry Bonds’ success is that baseball — and every other sport — must do more to police and stamp out the use of dangerous performance-enhancing drugs.