I suspected Barry Bonds was using steroids as he hit his record 73 home runs in 2001; I felt sure of it by the start of the 2005 season. That’s when the BALCO scandal was breaking, a year before the release of Mark Fainaru-Wada and Lance Williams’s book Game of Shadows. But Bonds’s leaked grand-jury testimony, the seed of the book, had little to do with my certainty. Rather, it was a table I saw comparing Bonds’s seasons from his mid-to-late 30s with those of other baseball greats.
Hank Aaron at 35: 44 and .300; at 36: 38 and .298; at 37: 47 and .327; at 38: 34 and .265; at 39: 40 and .301.
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Time afflicts us all, even baseball’s immortals, and the table captures the ebbing skills of past greats as they aged from 35 to 40. But here’s Bonds at 35: 49 and .306; at 36: 73 and .328; at 37: 46 and .370; at 38: 45 and .341; at 39: 45 and .362.
But Bonds didn’t merely fight off decay: he enormously improved. Meanwhile, I noticed that his skull looked bigger, a phenomenon linked anecdotally with human growth hormone. So in time I knew. Something too good to be true, I concluded, isn’t.
Eliot Asinof wrote, not in his Eight Men Out but in 1919: America’s Loss of Innocence, that “mostly the secrecy was maintained by the power of the owners themselves. Whatever they knew, or suspected, they concealed, terrified at losing the public faith in the game.” Press skeptics were pooh-poohed, whistle-blowing players thanked and dismissed. “The official, if unspoken policy preferred to let the rottenness grow rather than risk the dangers of exposure, for all the pious phrases about the nobility of the game and its inspirational value to youth. In fact, that too was part of the business.”
