I read this book and there is absolutely nothing in it that changes what we already know.

The truth is that many of Bonds’s. et. al.’s, records and statistics were accumulated before MLB imposed a ban on the use of steroids and other performance enhancing drugs. This must be taken into consideration when assessing these baseball players. A professional athlete is encouraged to take any legal avenue to improve his ability.

No one will ever know how many did it in the nineties and early 2000’s. Several players come to mind. How about Brady Anderson and this 50 home run season? Where did that come from? One might also question Cecil Fielder. It goes on and on possibly into the 1980’s too.

Are we to expunge the statistics of these players also for the years that they put up their unusual (for them) numbers? Remember that Babe Ruth was hitting 30-50 homers a season once upon a time when the rest of the league totaled less than he alone. Could the Babe have found some elicit potent?

I am not trying to absolve the current day player. Once these drugs became illegal then they broke the law and should be punished. Just how do we do that, I’m not sure. Hopefully we don’t institute another Pete Rose Law.

One final thought! The sad truth is it takes a special person to be able to hit a baseball thrown at 85-95 miles per hour with all sorts of twists and turns on it. Steroids and other enhancement drugs cannot improve your ability to hit that baseball. They may help with your bat speed and the power behind your swing allowing you to hit the ball further but they do not make you a better “hitter”. That’s a God given talent that few have and even fewer have honed to the MLB level.

So what do we do? In my opinion we live with what has happened. We don’t perform witch hunts. As with so many things in life we learn how to handle it and now that there are stiff penalties it shouldn’t happen again. I feel terrible about all the murderers never caught and worse about the falsely convicted before DNA testing but that’s the way life plays out. Let Bonds and the other have their records. They will realize that the vast number of baseball fans who care (and remember we are talking about baseball statistics here) won’t respect them for their tainted statistics. And if we worry about the children then we really haven’t learned much about ourselves from our history – if we had, wars would be a thing of the past. The kids will grow up realizing as many adults do today that there were cheaters in baseball just as there are cheaters in every darn occupation and walk of life.