am I the only one with no opinion on the whole Bonds/steriods issue??

:shrug:

I think Bonds being such a asshole makes it easier to hate him. I remember when Sosa and McGuire were chasing MArris' record, bith were so nice to the media, granting hour long press conferences after each homerun they hit and engaging in playful banter with the reporters. Bonds hates the press and has been somewhat tough on fans at non-paid signing events.

As for the records, I hope he breaks them both this season and then goes off to the sunset. We will always thingof the last 8 years as the steroid era when baseball saved itself following the strike by turning a blind eye to the drug abuse by the big bashers. I remember all the writers claiming the ball was juiced by mlb after teh strike to bring back attention to the sport. It was not the ball but the biceps that were juiced.

I'm originally from the Bay Area and I can remember going to Candlestick Park when I was a kid and sitting over the Giant's dugout. After awhile you could hear the muffled shouts and voices of kids in the tunnel leading to the locker room playing some kind of game off the walls with a ball. It was Barry and Willie's kids playing ball off the walls of the tunnel.

Barry has been under the spotlight ever since. Has he sometimes been a jerk about it? Yeah. But the press and public has been as much of a jerk to him as well. I think what Barry suffered was an intense lack of privacy for most of his life. If he has a fault with it it's the fact that he is human and never learned how to put on a public mask and how to create a public persona for the fans and the media. He's just Barry, all the time. If anything, what we've gotten from Barry over the years is probably the most honest look at a person. If anything, he did most of his talking on the field. If you look at the text of what he has said over the years, I think, you will find that everything he has said is how he actually feels at the time. How many times have you heard Barry actually use the standard cliches? It's a rarity. I think most people are so used to the standard fair of worn out phrases and canned answers from players that they have a hard time dealing with honest answers.

As for the steroid thing. You know, when I pitched in the semi-pros until I was thirty-five, I wish I could have had some of the clear cream steroid to rub my shoulder with. The one thing steroids are known for is their recuperative properties to muscle tissue. If used in this fashion, I feel that a certain type of steroid should be allowed. Hell, when you use Hydrocortisone your using a form of steroid. After playing a 162 games some form of recuperative treatment is necessary. If you had some type of physical malady that kept you from being able to perform your job up to the expected level, wouldn't you find something that would help you maintain functionabilty? All I'm saying is that this whole steroid thing needs to be looked at from a different and new perspective. Performance inhancing steroids are much different that medicinal ones.