Somewhere, Barry Lamar Bonds is nodding knowingly, for he has found the benefit of the doubt that was not afforded him.
It went to Ryan Braun.
First, lets say this right off. Bonds was not, is not, and will not be a sympathetic figure here when the topic is performance enhancing drugs. This is not a defense, and should not be interpreted as being one.
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But Braun got caught with enough testosterone to fuel a room full of extras in Gladiator, and the process will grind its way through to whatever end it reaches -- with all the political ramifications that infers.
RELATED: MLBPA says 'avoid rush to judgement' with Braun
So why, then, is there such an eagerness to find Brauns seemingly implausible story so believable, or at least defensible by so many people who dove face-first into Bonds?
The options are two: Race, or personality. Neither is appealing.
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As someone who has uniformly found Bonds continual explanations and evasions for the pile of circumstantial evidence a difficult swallow, I find the contortions to come to Brauns comfort and aid obnoxious, especially the Hes too smart to do this with testing one.
Funny, that was the one that nobody bought when it was brought up in Bonds defense -- that he was allegedly too smart to use after all he had already accomplished before the winter of 1998.
So Braun is smart and Bonds is not? Based on what level of testing? Based on what transcripts? Wonderlic? SATs? New York Times crossword puzzle speed?
The point here is this: If youre in the judgment game, you cant pull out when its a guy you like.
Actually, its always been hard to comprehend why so many baseball writers speak so stridently about defending the purity of the game -- its as if they work for baseball rather than their journalistic outlets. The story is the unauthorized use of illegal and untested drugs, not whether the game will be damaged by three extra feet of home run or two extra mph on a fastball that was a foot wide of home plate.
Weve also seem this phenomenon more recently in the NFL and NBA lockouts, where people covering the sport so desperately and plaintively rooted for any settlement as long as games would resume, as opposed to the value and ramifications of the settlement. Lots of people rooting for the sport they cover rather than the story they cover, which would be intolerable in any other journalistic endeavor.
But the Braun story brings it all home to roost, because it reminds us that journalists either dont take sides at all, or they take a side and stay on it. If Braun is in fact clean, the facts will determine that rather than the advocacy.
It also reminds us that this story has been covered incorrectly. This story has always been about public health, about drug use that is clearly proscribed by law and whose dangers are being continually researched. And the idea that somehow athletes should be given a pass that other citizens would not is so absurd that anyone who advances it should have been born three hundred years ago, when the divine right of kings was still considered cool.
In short, the advocacy surrounding Ryan Braun is baffling. Everyone covering the steroid scandal had come to understand that the previous generation of players had lost the benefit of the doubt for the misdeeds of their compatriots. And five years later, a high-profile positive test has resuscitated the benefit of the doubt. Seems like nobody wants to walk down that road again, even though it is a road that must be traveled if thats where it leads.
Its not that judgment is such a good idea, but that ship sailed back in the day. Whats worse, though, is pick-and-choose judgment based on nothing more than He seems . . . Everybody seems to be something, after all. It all depends on whos doing the seeming.
Ray Ratto is a columnist for CSNBayArea.com.