These next few days, as Barry Bonds proceeds in his unseemly quest to break Hank Aaron's all-time home run record, scores of thousands of the Bay Area's best citizens will pay as much as $85 a game to watch a spectacle that one Justice Department spokesman rightly describes as "cheating the baseball immortals."
Indeed, what makes this story worth telling at all is the Bay Area embrace of Barry Bonds, an embrace that explains all too much about the casual ethics of the contemporary left.
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Barry himself is one a kind. The son of Giants star Bobby Bonds, Barry started nursing career-long sulk at Junipero Serra High in nearby San Mateo.
Although the school's mission was to "foster Gospel values," those values apparently did not include humility, at least in Bond's case. By the time Major League scouts came sniffing, one of them would sum up the consensus on Barry's "Attitude/ Personality" with one highly explanatory word: "a–hole."
In Pittsburgh, at his first Major League stop, the writers gave him their MDP – "most despised player" – award. In San Francisco, where he returned in 1993 as a two-time MVP, he continued to creep out teammates and fans at a Hall of Fame level.
Unlike his future co-conspirator, Victor Conte lived a textbook Left Coast life. Born in Fresno to a working class Italian family, Victor quickly shucked his family's Catholicism and began studying Eastern philosophy, particularly the "Bhagavad Gita." If this sacred Hindu scripture contained any "Thou Shalt Nots," Conte must have overlooked them.
Conte bounced around California in classic New Age fashion, practicing yoga, eating organic foods and going on pseudo-religious retreats. In the midst of all this healthy living, the aspiring rock and roller also found time to deal drugs.
In time, Conte launched an enterprise known as the Millbrae Holistic Health Center and used it as a springboard to his next big idea, sports medicine. This all culminated in a new venture called the Bay Area Laboratory Co-Operative, BALCO for short.
San Francisco Chronicle reporters Lance Williams and Mark Fainaru-Wada tell the BALCO story well and in detail in their 2006 book, "Game of Shadows." Suffice it to say that Bonds "allegedly" began using steroids as a 34-year-old before the 1999 season.
Conte and Bonds hooked up two years later, 10 years after the federal government had outlawed the non-prescription use of steroids. That year Bonds hit a Major League record 73 home runs and won the Most Valuable Player Award for the National League.
Major League Baseball banned steroid use in 2002, but with Conte's all but undetectable drugs, Bonds felt free to ignore the ban. He would win the MVP award in 2002, 2003 and 2004 as well.
Bonds' stats bewildered baseball historian Bill Jenkinson, who has made a science of analyzing home run hitting. Not only was Bonds hitting more home runs as he moved into his late 30s, but he was also hitting them much farther.
"This is not humanly possible," says Jenkinson. "It cannot be done by even the most amazing athletic specimen of all time ... unless that specimen is cheating."
In the 12 years before that specimen started using steroids, 1986-1998, Bonds had averaged 32 home runs a season. In his five full seasons of alleged steroid use, Bonds averaged 52 homers. The Giants' management turned a blind eye to all of this.
As Bonds lumbered shamelessly on toward Hank Aaron's all-time home run record, he continued to cheat, and the San Francisco fans continued to cheer.
This should not surprise. History and tradition – of anything other than San Francisco itself – matter less in the Bay Area than they do anywhere in America. Even after the feds busted Conte and dragged a dissembling Bonds before a grand jury, Giant fans exalted in the team's performance.
"The man is a saint," gushed a kindergarten teacher with her young son on the occasion of his 700th home run. After his grand jury appearance, notes Jeff Pearlman in his Bonds bio, "Love Me, Hate Me," "San Francisco fans hailed their star not only as a hero but as a martyr."
By the end of the 2005 season even die-hard San Francisco fans had to acknowledge that Bonds had scammed his way to his stats. In a random ballpark survey, 92 out of 100 Giant fans conceded that Bonds had cheated. Still, only 24 out of 100 expressed any concern that this might be wrong.
Despite their presumed ethical superiority, Bay Area fans showed little regard for the character of the man and even less for the integrity of the game.
As Pearlman wryly observes, "San Francisco led the league in pre-game ceremonies to bring attention to world problems." And yet as steroid abuse swelled nationwide, the Giants organization ignored a problem that was potentially lethal and altogether local.
Worse, the Giants held up as a model for young San Franciscans a man whose own abuse, if emulated, could turn their heads into pumpkins and their testicles into peas.
A 12-year-old fan, interviewed by the Chronicle in July 2006, perfectly mimics the smugly amoral drift of Bay Area opinion. "I'm just glad he's not in prison," said the boy relieved that Bonds was not to be charged with perjury. "It's pretty much all racist. They keep trying to get him, but he's never failed a drug test. They don't have anything on him. They're just going to keep trying until they do."
San Francisco's enabling fans kept Bonds in business, and the steroids put him in the record books. And here's the rub. Baseball is a game of records, of traditions. Bonds undermined not just the integrity of the game as played today, but the very meaning of the sport, past, present and future.
Like so many of those nurtured on flower power, Conte could have cared less about tradition. He went to jail unrepentant, threatening to write an autobiography called "No Choice," its premise being that if everyone cheats you have no choice but to cheat too – and the fans, presumably, have no choice but to cheer the cheats.
In the Bay Area, this all passes for wisdom.
Note: Cashill's newest book, "What's the Matter with California," will be out in October.
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