Just a quick shout-out to Barry Bonds. Congrats. The pressure is off. Time to hit Cabo…

Okay, so this is a non-SEO post. It happens. I’m pouring through log files again looking at what meta tags are working and which ones aren’t and the only thing keeping me awake is every 20-25 minutes or so, Barry Bonds comes up to bat.

I’m not much of a baseball fan … although I went to a lot of A’s and Giants games as a kid with my dad. I went to the ‘74 World Series (A’s beat the Dodgers) and saw Hank Aaron hit number #751 against Oakland. Cool stuff. But I gotta tell ya, 162 games? Can’t get into it.

But Bonds, there’s drama and there’s controversy. I’ve heard the steroid thing, the asterisk issue, all of it. The way I look at it, the Giants haven’t won a World Series since they came to San Francisco, and they haven’t won one since the 1950s. Anyone on the team NOT taking steroids isn’t trying hard enough!

Seriously, I’m a tester. I love numbers. I love comparing issues. People want to say Aaron did it clean without performance enhancing drugs? Fine. Let’s say that is true, although it is difficult to prove since there wasn’t testing back then.

But look up the average speed a major league pitcher threw a baseball in the 70s, and look up what they can hurl now. Very few pitchers in the 70s could throw a fastball in the 90mph range, most were in the mid to low 80s. Today, dozens of pitchers can throw triple digits, and most are in the mid to upper 90s. In fact, the average speed of a fastball of a major league pitcher is up by 17 mph today as compared to the 70s. How can there be an increase that much in just 30 years?

It’s gotta be Performance Enhancing Substances.

Conclusion: Aaron was clean and hit 755 against clean pitchers. Bonds was juiced and hit 756 against juiced pitchers. I’d say that’s fair. Wouldn’t you?

Leave the asterisk off the record, and check out this spoof SNL did on Bonds. It is dang funny.

Add On: Let’s face it, baseball’s history is full of cheaters … baseball EMBRACES cheating. Let’s run through some examples:

• Gaylord Perry, who during his 22-year career, admitted to doctoring baseballs with his own spit or the use of Vaseline. Even though he admitted he cheated, he was still elected into the Hall of Fame.
• Don Sutton, another 300+ game winner and Hall of Famer who was called “Black and Decker” because he was always scuffing baseballs.
• Joe Niekro, who had an emery board “fall” out of his pocket during a game. Upon being “searched” by the umpire, he takes the emery board, and in one full motion throws up his hands to proclaim his innocence (”Look, nothing in my pockets!) as he tosses the emery board over his shoulder. Yeah, he did that as well as my 10-year old son.
• Sammy Sosa gets busted when his corked bat “explodes” as he hits a pitch. Sosa claimed that he uses corked bats during batting practice to show off to the young fans. Um, yeah right. It is later reported that there were over 70 corked bats in the Cubs locker room NOT belonging to Sosa.
• My favorite corked bat story was with Albert Bell. Talk about your teamwork. The umpire suspects Bell’s bat is corked. The umpire is right, but he has no proof. So he takes it and says they will X-ray it after the game. Bell knows it’s corked and so do his teammates. What happens? A teammate crawls through the duct work above the umpires locker room, drops down inside and replaces the corked bat with a conventional one. Now THAT is someone you want on your side!

I heard on the radio this morning that Americans lead the world in cheating. We cheat on our homework, we cheat on our taxes, we cheat our employers, we drive faster than the speed limit, we buy and give alcohol to under aged kids, we cheat on our spouses and/or significant others, and the list goes on and on. And these same people that cheat every single day of their lives are asking for baseball players to play the game clean while at the same time screaming for the home run.

It is pathetic really, and in my view one of the biggest problems in America today.

Hypocrisy.

I’m not perfect, far from it, which is why I am fine with Bonds breaking Aaron’s record. After all, hasn’t Bonds passed every single drug test? He has. If you call Bonds a cheater, how about you volunteer for an IRS audit?

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 7th, 2007 at 11:53 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.