The Chronicle‘s Editorial LiveJournalists offer some advice today for Astros fans regarding Barry Bonds:
Astros fans should forgo taunts and display good sportsmanship as San Francisco slugger Barry Bonds swings for history.
Pssst, LiveJournalists: The series started last night. You should have run this editorial yesterday.
Or perhaps not. Here’s the reasoning behind the advice not to taunt one of Major League Baseball’s biggest documented cheaters:
Before acting like the inmates of some of the league’s animal houses when Bonds takes the field or comes to the plate, Houstonians should consider the following: he has never been convicted of illegal drug use, flunked a drug test or been banned from the game.
Until any of those things happens, he deserves respect in his quest for Ruth’s record, second only to Hank Aaron’s 755 home runs.
No he doesn’t. The documentation that Bonds is a cheater is extensive and leaves little doubt. As the Chronicle‘s Richard Justice wrote yesterday,
There’s one other thing Bonds brings with him tonight. And this, more than the home runs he has hit or the millions of dollars he has made, is what Taylor Hooton might have noticed as well.
Barry Bonds is widely seen not as the best player who ever lived but as the most accomplished cheat.
Nothing can remove the stain. Even if he’s indicted for perjury or income tax evasion, even if commissioner Bud Selig eventually suspends him, it won’t hurt more than the damage done to his reputation.
He can never, ever get his good name back. That’s what steroids have cost Barry Bonds.
His pursuit of Ruth and Aaron has come with the uneasy feeling that it means nothing.
That Bonds’ steroid use hasn’t been proven in a court of law to the satisfaction of the Editorial LiveJournalists is irrelevant.
The Editorial LiveJournalists are right that Houston sports fans don’t need to engage in “fan-player brawls in the stands and postgame street riots,” in response to the Bonds controversy, but that’s not really something we’d expect of Houston sports fans anyway.
To go well beyond that and say fans shouldn’t taunt or otherwise react to the cheating Bonds is just silly, in addition to being a day late.
