756 With A Big Asterisk

Love him or hate him, Barry Bonds made baseball history tonight after hitting the record breaking 756th homer. He topped that off later with his 757th career dinger. Regardless of what Mr. Bonds says, his record will always be tainted in my mind and the minds of many others.

Let's get one thing straight. Before he bulked up into a monster slugger, he was already on the road to the Hall of Fame. You could take all the performance enhancing drugs you want, but it's not going to help you hit a 90+ MPH pitch. The man was born with talent. What's in question is whether he could've accomplished the feat of breaking the long standing record set by Hank Aaron 33 years ago without performance enhancing drugs.

Of course there's no definitive proof that links Bonds to the use of performance enhancing drugs, but there's enough questionable evidence that makes you go hmm. He claims that if he did take performance enhancing drugs, it was administered to him without his knowledge. For anyone to go through such a physical transformation, especially a professional athlete, and not know what he/she is consuming is just ludicrous in my opinion. The training and dieting (I don't mean weight loss dieting) required needs to be well thought out. Even if you rely on high priced trainers and nutritionists to help you get there, you still learn much about what you're doing to your body.

At the end of the day, it doesn't matter what I think. Unless some indisputable evidence surfaces, Bonds will go into the history books as the man who holds the home run record and the asterisk next to that number will eventually fade.