America at Large:I can tell you exactly where I was (at my brother's house in Tuscaloosa, Alabama) and what I was doing (finishing up an overdue book, with one eye on the television screen) on April 8th, 1974, the night Hank Aaron hit his 715th home run to break Babe Ruth's all-time record.
Thirty-three years later I can recall the inning (the fourth), the name of the pitcher who served up the record-breaker (the Dodgers' Al Downing). I could even tell you what happened to the historic ball (the Braves reliever Tom House caught it when it cleared the fence and landed in the Atlanta bullpen) and what he did with it (House raced across the field and was there to present it to Aaron by the time he reached home plate).
I was fast asleep when Barry Bonds hit his 756th homer Tuesday night to eclipse Aaron's record. (So, apparently, was Hank Aaron; at least that's what a wire-service reporter who phoned his home for a reaction was told).
The momentous event was witnessed by 43,154 citizens in San Francisco, the one place where Bonds is not universally despised. It was also witnessed by a posse consisting of a few-dozen sports columnists from around the country who had spent the past week or more on the West Coast after having been consigned to the Bonds Death Watch by sports editors convinced that readers gave a spit one way or the other.
The response yesterday morning was in a sense heart-warming. Almost to a man, my erstwhile colleagues appear to have greeted the proceedings with a collective yawn.
The ongoing saga of Barry Bonds has gone beyond outrage. For the moment Bonds may have displaced Aaron - and relegated Ruth's hallowed mark to number three on the all-time list - but nobody believes it for a second. Barry Bonds didn't break Aaron's record, Balco did.
There is a sort of delicious irony at play here. Back in 1998, when Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa started bashing baseballs out of parks around the country in unprecedented numbers, most of America rejoiced - but not Bonds. He was, according to Game of Shadows, the seminal text chronicling the events that culminated in Tuesday night's homer, aware of what most of the country was not - that McGwire and Sosa had cheated their way into the record book.
It was then that Bonds decided to join them by embarking on his own chemical crusade. That his subsequent exploits would be viewed with the same jaundiced eye he once cast upon McGwire and Sosa probably never occurred to him - and if it did, he plainly didn't care.
Suffice it to say that on the night Bonds finally did break the record, Bud Selig, the Lord High Commissioner of Baseball, made it a point to be elsewhere.
Once Bonds's ongoing assault made the record inevitable, I'd vowed to myself that I wasn't even going to write about it when it happened, but his smug pronouncement that his new mark "is not tainted" demands a response.
If the record is not tainted, then why has Greg Anderson, Bonds's long-time personal trainer, who once had the free run of the San Francisco clubhouse, opted to spend the past several months in jail on contempt charges stemming from his refusal to answer questions about Bonds?
If he was using "flaxseed oil", as he claims, and didn't rely on the assistance of everything from steroids to female fertility drugs, how does he explain the fact that a man who had hit 292 home runs in the first 10 years of his major-league career has hit 464 since?
That at the age of 37, when he hit 73 home runs to surpass McGwire's questionable mark, that number represented 24 more than he had ever hit in a single season? Or that this late-blooming power surge was accompanied by a remarkable transformation in which the size of his head abruptly took on the approximate dimensions of a large watermelon?
If Game of Shadows is a concocted fiction, as Bonds has smugly asserted, why hasn't Barry sued Lance Williams and Mark Fainaru-Wada?
Isn't that what you'd do if the truth were on your side?
Now that the travelling media circus has left San Francisco, there remain rays of hope. One is that the former senator George Mitchell, charged with heading up baseball's in-house steroids investigation, will come up with sufficient irrefutable facts that this "record" might still be expunged.
Another is that the most recent incarnation of a Federal grand jury sitting in Northern California will find sufficient facts to indict Bonds for perjury.
The other remedy remains in the hands of my colleagues. When I retired from the Boston Herald in 2005, I remained an elector for the Baseball Hall of Fame. The most important vote in that capacity came last December, when Mark McGwire's name first appeared on the ballot. I made it a point not to vote for McGwire, and when the results were tabulated, it was gratifying to learn that over 76 per cent of the electorate agreed with me.
Bonds is 43 years of age, and his name won't appear on the Hall of Fame ballot until he is almost 50. I'm just guessing here, but I think I can safely predict that Barry won't be admitted, either - at the very least, certainly not on his first try.
The irony here is that 10 years ago Barry Bonds would have walked into Cooperstown if he'd never heard of drugs. Well before he began juicing, he was already a lead-pipe cinch for the Hall of Fame. That he will be denied a place among the sport's immortals, and his name will be forever synonymous with disgrace, is a legacy of his own creation.
His, that is, and Balco's.
