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Originally Posted by Piney
I will have more fun with this when I get home from work. But I will leave with this tidbit.
What Bonds did was not cheating and against the baseball rules. There was no testing and no written rule in baseball that you were not allowed to use steroids. Now you can say it was illegal, fine but you can be a total drug addict and only get suspended a season and get reinstated 20 times.
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Come on now. Crack never gave Daryl Strawberry or Dwight Gooden a competetive advantage. So the analogy is fruitless. The fact that the conduct is illegal only asserts that a rule by baseball would have been redundant. They would have been telling him he couldn't do something he already couldn't legally do. The reason he did steroids was because he believed it helped his performance - which clearly it did. The reason it gave him a competitive advantage is because other players weren't willing to take either the legal or health risk associated with steroids. In honor of those players, Bonds is being rightfully ripped apart.
So he did something illegal that gave him a competitive advantage over other players. I don't want to play semantics, but that's cheating IN MY BOOK - MLB rule or not.
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Was it unethical? Yep. But baseball has never been an ethical sport with stealing signs, corking bats, spitballs & greenies. So why start now?
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Stealing signs happens when teams allow them to be stolen. Corking a bat is cheating. Spitballs are cheating. Using Steroids is cheating.
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I will say this if your career was made by the Home Run during the steroid era you aren't getting in. McGwire, Canseco, Sosa & Palmeiro should not get in. But Bonds was deserving before the home runs and the only thing he did was ruin the reputation of what could have been a legendary baseball player.
While I don't like Bonds, I respect him as a great player and everyone is missing the boat on a great athlete steroids or not.
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He WAS a great athlete. But, you can't just wipe away the last 7 years like he retired in 1998 instead of turning to steroids. The fact is that his legacy hurts baseball - and I fail to see how that is Hall of Fame material.