Or consider Lasik and other vision enhancements, which allow almost any athlete to own the visual acuity that helped make Ted Williams a nonpareil hitter and judge of the strike zone. Let me emphasize: This isn't a case of athletes with subpar vision trying to be normal. It's a case of athletes with normal vision trying to be exceptional.
Throw in the quantum improvements in sports nutrition, (non-steroid-assisted) workout technology and gear -- shoes, gloves and bats, plus the various guards, braces and other contrivances that have today's ballplayers striding to the plate looking vaguely bionic -- and I would ask Bonds' detractors: Would you have baseball revert to what it was in Abner Doubleday's era?
The irony is that all this may be much ado about little anyway, because the straight-line relationship that many draw between enhancements and performance does not exist.
This is true even of steroids. If admitted user Jose Canseco can be believed, hundreds of major league players became juicers during the last generation. None has approached what Bonds has achieved. Critics use Ken Caminiti as a poster boy for reckless steroid abuse, blaming the drugs for his untimely death; Caminiti topped out at 40 home runs in his MVP-winning season, 1996.
Say what you will about Bonds, he has realized his physical potential to a degree that no other player can claim. Perhaps it wasn't steroids per se that enabled him to transcend but, rather, his almost superhuman dedication to training. There is simply no way to separate out the variables as neatly as some would urge.
Yes, it's true that steroids are illegal and have harmful side effects. It's also true that we live in a society that allows us to self-destruct by any number of means. Here again, the distinctions we draw are impossibly arbitrary. In a culture that continues to celebrate the consumption of alcohol despite the documented damage it does, how can we plausibly vilify a guy who takes steroids with a specific athletic goal in mind?
Leave Bonds alone, folks. And leave sports alone. Tolerate, if not embrace, a Darwinistic climate wherein every player attempts to achieve what he can, however he can. "Survival of the fittest." No other approach makes sense.
