FOR THE HANDFUL OF FOLKS ON BOARD with all of this, I will be taking the rest of the week off, heading south to St. Louis for golf, assuming the weather improves a bit. I probably should take the computer with me, but I am so thrilled that I am able to make it work where it is nestled against a window sill that I am afraid to take it on the road and mess that up. Back next week.
T.S. O’Connell
I think it must have been in the last millennium, you know, that one that looks so charmingly benign and non-threatening from just 11 or so years ago. I was at a card show in New Jersey, covering it for Sports Collectors Digest, and Juan Gonzalez was one of the autograph guests. Since it was 1998 or 1999, it was essentially prior to the time when we gave much thought to the questions surrounding steroids, though a number of people – myself included – had been deeply disturbed for some time about the statistical anomalies surrounding power numbers that had seemingly peaked in the goofy 1998 season.
I got a chance to go behind the curtain into the autograph area, and I sidled up to where Gonzalez was sitting awaiting his turn to sign. And I took one look at him and thought, “This guy is on steroids.” Simple as that. That doesn’t make me any brighter than anybody else, just maybe a bit more inclined to indulge gut reactions.
I’d never seen any professional athlete with the kind of muscle development that I saw with Gonzalez. It was just out of whack, and if a magazine editor from rural Wisconsin could spot it so easily, it’s a fair bet that all those big-time members of the ham sandwich brigade could too. But you didn’t hear all that much about it at the time, except for the odd party pooper here and there who insisted on not drinking the same Kool Aid as everybody else.
If I need to add that I’m not alleging that Gonzalez was on steroids, but merely pointing out my own conviction at the time that he must have been. I bring all this up now because we’re collectively huddled around our televisions and computer screens watching the Barry Bonds perjury trail unfold, and in the process going through this awkward charade. Of course he used steroids. All the evidence points to it, from his enlarged hat size and bulked-up body to his shrunken, uh, testicles. How would you like to sit in a courtroom while people discussed that particular topic?
Though you hardly hear anybody talk about it much, I was always partial to the argument that we should have known something was amiss with Barry simply from the statistics that he was putting up in the final ¼ of his career. There is absolutely no precedent for a ballplayer making the statistical leap that he did after age 35, a time when even the greatest of Hall of Famers found their remarkable skills diminished to a degree beyond anything in the first 10-15 years of their career.
As taxpayers, we’ll end up spending $20 or $30 million to prove something that we already know to threaten an individual who poses no threat to society with incarceration that will most likely not be imposed anyway. Alice as she hurtled down the hole couldn’t have been any more mystified.
- T.S. O’Connell
