Now that he’s broken Major League Baseball’s (and, more importantly, Hank Aaron’s) career home run record, I’m pretty sure Barry Bonds’s place in the record books is secure unless George Mitchell’s investigation yields a definitive list of everyone who took steroids in the game’s history. Barring the highly improbable discovery of such a list, the only other option is to punish the proven cheaters while wondering about everyone else who had a shocking one year spike in power numbers or enjoyed a long, successful career with a minimum of injuries. Much as I loathe how guys like Bonds, Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa hijacked two of the most celebrated records in sports, it really isn’t fair to exclusively vilify the guys who got caught when we could very well be venerating the achievements of other, less high-profile cheaters.
This is why I’m a tad dubious as to the intent of HBO’s adaptation of Game of Shadows. Though they’ve hired the best director of baseball movies in the history of the medium in Ron Shelton (who will also co-write the screenplay with John Norville), the narrative of that very intriguing book is incomplete until Bonds has his (next) day in court (he’s been indicted on several counts of perjury with regards to his testimony before a grand jury in 2003). As this is a federal indictment, he’s probably on his way to jail, but, still, rushing this project into production before this is all settled strikes me as deeply opportunistic.
But Shelton can’t begin writing the screenplay until the writers’ strike is finished, so maybe there’ll be some kind of resolution to the Bonds story between now and the beginning of production in (presumably) ’08.