Matters of the Gravest Importance

Given that I promised Jay, who's the only person I know who actually reads this bloody thing, that I would be writing a fuller version of my half-baked thoughts on health care sometime last week, and given that I haven't done so yet, I thought that I would give my two cents on recent pressing developments in the world of...baseball.

Hey, it's my blog.

In chronological order, then. Barry Bonds, beyond all possible doubt unless you believe in extraterrestrial conspiracies, is a drug cheat. Or, rather, he is a user of steroids of such enthusiasm and openness to experimentation that I'll freely admit that I'm, as we baseball intellectuals like to put it, grossed out by some of the stuff he's alleged to have put into his body. I mean, cattle hormones?

And yet. (We all knew this was coming, right?) None of these substances were against the rules of baseball when he took them. Maybe they should have been, but they weren't. "But steroids, without a prescription, are illegal in the United States," I hear the drug warriors howling. Absolutely true. So are amphetamines, which are used, according to credible anecdote, by roughly 98% of ballplayers at some point during the season to get themselves "up" for games. Ballplayers, including such sainted idols of the game as Mickey Mantle and Whitey Ford, have been using speed forever, it seems. Yet no one says a thing about that.

So as to what should be done about all of this, I'm ambivalent. If individual sportswriters want to refuse to vote for him to make it into the Hall of Fame-there is a "character" clause in the election criteria, so they'd be within their rights-then fine. If enough sportswriters don't vote for him, he won't make it in, and that's fine too. I think, myself, that the character clause is idiotic and that steroids or not he was the best player of his generation and, finally, that he cheated, if you can cheat without breaking the rules of the game, to win, in the time-honoured tradition of guys like Gaylord Perry and Leo Durocher, so I'd vote for him, but whatever.

The "solution" that drives me absolutely bonkers is the suggestion that some or all of his statistics should be stricken from the record. What infuriates me about this is the airy, thoughtless way it's always proposed-"just strike out the 297 homers he hit after 1998, and then we'll have a record of what he did when he was clean." Right. Except it's not like track and field. It's a team game, and the Giants scored runs and won ballgames in part because of those home runs. Do you go back through the record and take away runs that Bonds drove in? That he scored? Both? Do you void any games he played in? Do you, like the pinheaded NCAA in reference to the 1992 Michigan Wolverines, say that the 2002 Angels won the World Series over...nobody? I think we're all capable of applying whatever mental discount we choose to Bonds' statistics, and monkeying around with the records of what actually happened on the field is to be discouraged.

Next on the list of events in baseball is the elimination of the United States from the World Baseball Classic. To this I say, hooray. Not because of any particular anti-American animus, but because the upending of predictable storylines is always good for a sport, and the WBC, to my delight, has been a lot of fun. Also, given that the Japanese got robbed in their game against the States, and probably deserved to go through anyway. I wish that baseball had broken up the pools a little, so that we got to see different matchups each round, instead of the same teams playing each other repeatedly (is everyone ready for Korea-Japan III?) but otherwise it's been a great success, it says here.

And finally, and most importantly, the Blue Jays have locked up Doc Halladay through 2010.

Given that this offseason, exciting and hope-inducing though its been, resulted in both my second-(Orlando Hudson) and third-favourite (Dave Bush) Jays getting traded away, I can't say how relieving it is to have my favourite player under contract to my favourite team. I think Halladay might be a Hall of Famer one day, and it would be awfully cool if he did it as a career Blue Jay. I can't wait for opening day against the Twins, when he'll square off against the one guy I think might be a better pitcher in the American League-Johan Santana.

Just two more weeks to Opening Day...