Word: home-run
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Barry Bonds is a contact hitter who seems on his way to eclipsing Hank Aaron's career home-run record of 755. But it is Bonds' confirmed contact with illegal steroids that sent runners into motion last week to confront the biggest drug scandal in baseball history. Suddenly the most open secret in the sport was out, and it implicated baseball's biggest star and the titanic records he had accumulated. "I will leave no stone unturned in accomplishing our goal of zero tolerance by the start of spring training," vowed Major League Baseball commissioner Bud Selig in New York...
...especially as genetic engineering grows more advanced. When people of means can buy sharper brains and stronger bodies for themselves or better genetic profiles for their kids, juiced-up athletes will be the least of our ethical worries. If Giants slugger Barry Bonds deserves an asterisk next to his home-run records, maybe we will deserve asterisks next to our salaries, our sexual conquests and our kids' SAT scores...
Major League Baseball needs A-Rod's greatness to be a distraction from the steroid scandal that is making people want their money back from the home-run explosion of the past few years. The scandal didn't land within fungo distance of him, but Rodriguez, a company guy all the way, claims competing against cheaters doesn't bother him--only partly because he has led the American League in homers the past three years anyway. "I'm a strong believer in innocent until proven guilty," he says. "I've never assumed any other players were on steroids...
Powerful forces are marshaled on both sides of the debate (and in the middle). The union is fighting to limit the number of players whose steroid tests the government can subpoena. The owners--grateful for the home-run explosion that helped put fans back in the seats after the bitter 1994 strike but worried that fans will cry foul over steroid use--have assumed their familiar duck-and-cover stance. And Bush, a former co-owner of the Texas Rangers, is reportedly trying to organize a steroids summit. Tony Serra, Anderson's lawyer, argues Bonds is a "trophy martyr." Says...
...history? Baseball is all history: comparing today's players with yesteryear's is among the great pleasures of the sport. That makes baseball fans more fervent lovers of tradition than Tevye. They can cite, as Scripture, the career home-run totals of Ruth (714) and Hank Aaron (755). And they're not always eager to see records broken. So old-time fans are skeptical of modern-era players, who have had as many 50-homer seasons in the past decade as occurred in the previous century. Bonds, 39, set the all-time season home-run record...