Lance Williams and Mark Fainaru-Wada, San Fransisco Chronicle Staff Writers
Wednesday, August 8, 2007
His personal trainer sits in prison for refusing to testify against him. Major League Baseball's legal team is investigating his suspected steroid use. A federal grand jury has targeted him in an ongoing perjury probe.
In breaking baseball's hallowed career home run record Tuesday, Giants star Barry Bonds managed to overcome the intense pressures and distractions stemming from his involvement in the BALCO steroids scandal - and from the widespread belief that his late-career power surge has been fueled by banned drugs.
In San Francisco, Bonds' record-setting home run was met with cheers.
But elsewhere in the nation, it was an awkward moment that called renewed attention to baseball's so-called steroid era, a time when the sport seemed unable or unwilling to stop players from using illegal performance-enhancing drugs to become bigger and faster and put up unprecedented offensive numbers.
Hank Aaron, the Atlanta Braves star whose record was overtaken by Bonds, didn't attend the big event. Baseball Commissioner Bud Selig, who ordered an investigation into steroids in the game in response to reports about Bonds' use of banned drugs, waffled for months. Corporate sponsors refused to underwrite the home run chase.
And as Bonds approached the record, opposing fans taunted him with chants and signs declaring him a drug cheat. The razzing was so intense that when the Giants came to town, some clubs sought to tamp it down, confiscating signs and banners referring to Bonds and steroids.
Harry Edwards, longtime sports sociologist at UC Berkeley, said fans' unease over Bonds reflected their discomfort with the rise of drugs in baseball, and the fear that the sport was locked in "a pharmaceutical arms race that no one can control," as he said in remarks at the recent National Association of Hispanic Journalists in San Jose.
Edwards said many who care about baseball worry that drugs have become so prevalent that the integrity of the game is in question, and its records are no longer meaningful - to the point that the holder of the home run record can no longer be regarded as the game's best home run hitter.
"We have our record holders, and we have our standard bearers," Edwards said, maintaining that Aaron should be considered the game's "standard bearer" for home runs because he set his mark without benefit of steroids. Of modern players, he said: "You might be allowed in the Hall of Fame, but as part of the Steroid Era."
Symbol of an era
It is ironic that Bonds would emerge as a symbol of baseball's steroid era, because people familiar with the matter say he turned to performance-enhancing drugs long after they had become common in the game.
Retired Oakland A's slugger Jose Canseco, who says he used steroids with many teammates, including Mark McGwire, contends that by the late 1980s the drugs were widely used. But people who know him say Bonds played without benefit of steroids until after the 1998 season, when McGwire, then with the St. Louis Cardinals, won national acclaim for breaking the single-season home run record held by the Yankees' Roger Maris.
According to his former girlfriend, Kimberly Bell, and other people who know him, Bonds regarded McGwire as an inferior player and a steroid user who was being celebrated simply because he could hit home runs. Deciding to remake himself into a power hitter, Bonds in the offseason sought out Greg Anderson, a boyhood acquaintance from the San Carlos Little League who, according to court records, had become a weight trainer and steroid dealer.
Anderson began supplying the Giants star with steroids, evidence seized by federal investigators shows. Anderson also introduced Bonds to BALCO founder Victor Conte, purveyor of "the clear" and "the cream" - designer steroids that couldn't be detected by conventional drug tests.
Bonds became far more muscular, and his hitting improved dramatically, even though he had reached an age when the performance of most players declines. From the start of his career through 1998, when he turned 34, Bonds had batted .290 and averaged 32 home runs per season. In the six seasons that followed, he batted .328 and averaged 49 home runs per year. In 2001, at age 37, he hit 73 home runs, shattering McGwire's single-season record. And now, at age 43, he has broken Aaron's all-time record of 755 as well.
Bonds' association with BALCO, Conte and Anderson has nagged at him since federal investigators raided the Burlingame-based Bay Area Laboratory Co-Operative in 2003.
Bonds was the biggest name among more than 30 sports stars who were subpoenaed to testify before the grand jury that investigated the BALCO drug conspiracy.
And while New York Yankees star Jason Giambi admitted that he had obtained BALCO's banned drugs from Anderson, Bonds insisted the trainer had only given him flaxseed oil and arthritis balm. Bonds claimed he had never knowingly used performance-enhancing drugs, even when confronted with doping calendars seized from Anderson's home that described Bonds' drug regimen, which also included human growth hormone.
The account of Bonds' testimony, first published in The Chronicle, convinced many in the game that Bonds had indeed used drugs, and eventually led Commissioner Selig to hire former Sen. George Mitchell to investigate baseball's steroid era. His report remains unfinished 16 months after the probe began. On the advice of his lawyer, Bonds has declined to speak to Mitchell.
Meanwhile, federal prosecutors were convinced that Bonds lied under oath when he denied using banned drugs. Even before Conte, Anderson and the other BALCO defendants pleaded guilty to steroid charges in 2005, the government had begun investigating Bonds for perjury. That probe has gone on for more than two years. Last year, some prosecutors wanted to indict Bonds. But then-U.S. Attorney Kevin Ryan decided first to subpoena Anderson to testify about Bonds and drugs.
Anderson refused, was found in contempt of court and has been in prison since before Thanksgiving. The government will not say when its probe of Bonds might be concluded, although the statute of limitations will finally run out in 2008.
Coming to terms
Giants fans, by and large, simply don't share the concerns about Bonds and drugs.
Many still say they believe Bonds never used steroids, according to a review of hundreds of e-mails sent to The Chronicle on the topic.
Others take a more legalistic view, saying that because he has never been convicted of a steroid-related crime or reported to have failed a steroid test, he should be presumed innocent.
"Have they ever caught Barry doing anything?" said former Giants outfielder Kevin Mitchell at the All-Star Game Fan Fest. "You've got to catch a person."
Still other Giants fans say they have accepted what Bonds has refused to admit - that he used banned drugs - and come to terms with it.
"I'm not one of these people who is shocked by any of this," says Jules Tygiel, a history professor at San Francisco State University and author of "Baseball's Great Experiment: Jackie Robinson and His Legacy," an account of the integration of the game. A longtime Giants fan, Tygiel says he likes watching Bonds play.
"All records are products of the times," he says. "In this case, we have a situation where players of the '90s took advantage of trends in conditioning and loopholes in the rules.
"Seeing it was unlikely they would get caught, they figured that the risk of using drugs, some legal, some of questionable legality, some new, was very minimal.
"And in the case of Bonds, he was the best of the drug-takers, assuming that he did, and I think the evidence is pretty overwhelming."
E-mail the writers at lwilliams@sfchronicle.com and mfainaruwada@sfchronicle.com.
This article appeared on page A - 8 of the San Francisco Chronicle
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