Anyone Notice Baseball Players not being as big this year as last year?

[Perfection]

Barry Bonds, Jason Giambi and several other baseball don't look as big this year as last year. You think this has anything to do with random drug testing now in affect?

[Smooth]

Yeah that would Probably be why, although Barry still looks big as fuck... It's gonna be interesting to see if there home run numbers stay the same, or if they start to fall off...

[M Dogg™]

Barry is big as fuck 'cause his older. I laugh at people saying Barry ain't skinny no more, older players usually gain weight, and Barry turned it into muscle. My boy is gonna fuck up home run records, and put Riverside on the map... lol. Ok so maybe he dumped his I.E. roots, but his name promotes his dad's name and his late father's name is all over the city. My boy is still big, the other players are getting smaller 'cause they off the juice, my boy as never on it. I predict he'll retire at over 800 home runs. Greatest player ever

[Perfection]

Barry is big as fuck 'cause his older. I laugh at people saying Barry ain't skinny no more, older players usually gain weight, and Barry turned it into muscle. My boy is gonna fuck up home run records, and put Riverside on the map... lol. Ok so maybe he dumped his I.E. roots, but his name promotes his dad's name and his late father's name is all over the city. My boy is still big, the other players are getting smaller 'cause they off the juice, my boy as never on it. I predict he'll retire at over 800 home runs. Greatest player ever

Bonds is twice the size he was in Pittsburgh, and now he has just happened to lost weight going into the season will there will be random drug testing. You can the excuse that Giambi wasn't on the roids and just lost the weight more than Bonds because Giambi has really bad knees and losing the weight would help his knees.

Like Eddie's quote says "if you're not cheating, than you're not trying" you can probably say the same for Bonds.

[eS El Duque]

Barry is big as fuck 'cause his older. I laugh at people saying Barry ain't skinny no more, older players usually gain weight, and Barry turned it into muscle. My boy is gonna fuck up home run records, and put Riverside on the map... lol. Ok so maybe he dumped his I.E. roots, but his name promotes his dad's name and his late father's name is all over the city. My boy is still big, the other players are getting smaller 'cause they off the juice, my boy as never on it. I predict he'll retire at over 800 home runs. Greatest player ever

LMAO...greatest player ever? sorry man...Shoeless Joe Jackson has a better chance at that title than bonds..and he got suspended

A-Rod has a very good chance of becoming the best player ever (same as VLad)....those two players are somthing special...they got talent no other players have.

R.I.P Ted WIlliams (greatest player ever)  

[M Dogg™]

Bonds is by far the best. He changes each and every game he is in. And for all those pre-Jackie Robinson players, please, they never played against black players and only represent half of the best baseball players back then. If the Negro Leagues played the Major Leagues back then, the Negro Leagues would win most of the time. So don't give this Shoeless Joe as the GOAT argument. The best players are either Bonds or Willie Mayes. And I go with Bonds because as a modern player, his bigger, fast and stronger than his godfather. Don't hate.

[M Dogg™]

oh and if you see Giambi in person, you can tell his on 'roids. He looks weird as fuck, like Brock Lesner only more juiced.

[Perfection]

^^You can tell Bonds is on roids and by the way you can't compare Bonds with guys like Ruth because different eras. You can't say Bonds is better than Ruth inceRuth didn't face negros because Ruth can only face who was allowed to play in Major League Baseball.

p.s. Brock Lesnar doesn't use Steroids he uses critine, which so far is proven not to be harmful to the human body.

[M Dogg™]

Bonds says his on critine too, and I have no problem with it. But Giambi looks juiced like a muthaphukka in person. He has the chin, and elbows of a 'riod freak. Look at wrestling in the 80's, look at the chins and elbows of the wrestlers, which are physical results of 'roids. Bonds does not show the physical evidence of 'roid use, unless it's the new 'roid that doesn't have the side effects.

[Primo]

it is possible to get big without steroids u know..

[pappy]

c'mon m dogg... its painfully obvious bonds is on the juice.  an if bonds was white u would be all over him for being on the jui.  bonds was a fuckin twig no he looks like the black version of hulk hogan.  an bonds will not go down as the best player ever.  i still got ty cobb, babe ruth,  willie mays,  an ted williams ahead of him.  an yea i would put shoeless joe jackson ahead of bonds considering the fact that joe jackson was retarded

[ACGRUNDY]

LOL @ anyone thinking bonds isn't on roids.  watch him barely hit 25 homers this year.

[M Dogg™]

c'mon m dogg... its painfully obvious bonds is on the juice.  an if bonds was white u would be all over him for being on the jui.  bonds was a fuckin twig no he looks like the black version of hulk hogan.  an bonds will not go down as the best player ever.  i still got ty cobb, babe ruth,  willie mays,  an ted williams ahead of him.  an yea i would put shoeless joe jackson ahead of bonds considering the fact that joe jackson was retarded

I don't give a damn who's white and who's not. My favorite football player, Bill Romonaski, favorite wrestler of all time, Hulk Hogan, favorite baseball player is actually Garret Anderson of the Angels, and favorite basketball player is Shaq, who if he said he was on 'roids, I wouldn't care. But I know Bonds is not. First, he was considered the best baseball player of the 90's back when he was skinny, and he was on his way to doing great things before. Why mess up his game when his game was already good. He got older, older players gain weight, it's natural. Look at Jim Edmonds of the Cardnals, another one of my favorites. His been getting bigger over time. Is he on 'roids? Bonds is not on 'roids.

[M Dogg™]

Is it steroids or sour grapes?
By Ralph Wiley
Page 2 columnist


Let's get it straight from the beginning.

This feeding frenzy, the 'Roid Outrage, expressed, by us, about whether Barry Bonds used performance-enhancing dietary supplements or anabolic testosterone-based steroids, is a case of dry and bitter Sour Grapes. Period.

Why?

Well, I'll tell you why.


It's not like you can all of a sudden sneak up and have 700 home runs in the big leagues. There is nothing, absolutely nothing on this green earth that you can eat drink, sniff, inject or rub on yourself that can make you hit 700 home runs in the Show. That product exists only in our collective imagination, and if he did drink the spiked Kool-Aid, so to speak, this would include Bonds.

Because if that were the case, in spite of all the "outrage," bottles of the stuff would be getting knocked back by just about everybody. People who are currently "outraged" would not only use it, they'd have their kids on it.

That's how much baseball, and baseball myth, and money, mean to us.

But you know and I know, deep down inside, there is no such product.

We also know Barry Bonds has 658 home runs. And counting.

The Bonds/steroids issue changed in the last week, with the new San Francisco Chronicle reports that he was sent steroids by Greg Anderson and/or BALCO. There's still a leap from that to him actually taking them, and, if he did, for how protracted a period.

So is that really what all this 'Roid Outrage is about?

I think so. Want to look in a mirror and see? Let's.

* * * * *

Let's start with Syd Thrift, former general manager of the Pittsburgh Pirates when Bonds first came up. Sixteen years ago I went to do a story for Sports Illustrated on Thrift, and on the success of the young Buccos, who were doing well in spite of a low payroll, with players like catcher Spanky Lavalliere, second baseman Jose Lind, outfielder Slick Van Slyke and infielder Bobby Bonilla -- all of whom, it should be noted, are no longer player big-league baseball, which flies in the face of the theory that whatever Bonds has accomplished is chemically-induced. Don't steroids eventually break you down and cause terrible physical problems, rip the tendon from bone and swell organs up and cause muscles to screw and malfunction rather than extend and contract as they do naturally?

But isn't Barry Bonds is out there every year, year after year, performing at the highest level? Where's Jose Canseco? Where is Ken Caminiti? Where is Brady Anderson? Where is Mark McGwire? Isn't that strange, for a man abusing even so much as food, or alcohol, or tobacco, or illegal pharmaceuticals, or certain other alkaloids, to have such longevity? Is Barry Bonds, by all accounts an egotistical sort, secretly sneaking around washing down monster steroids with water from the Fountain of Youth?

Now back then I didn't know Barry Bonds from the man in the moon. It was Thrift, notorious for poor-mouthing the talent, who keep alluding to Bonds: if Bonds did this he'd be better than Rickey Henderson; if Bonds did that he'd be better than Reggie Jackson; if Bonds did the other he might outhit Willie Mays. Thrift kept coming back to Bonds so much, I began watching him.

I watched his performance closely over the next 15 years, as he won six NL MVPs -- six! -- and p.o.'ed a lot of people in the process.

Now I'm supposed to think he swallowed something that did that for him? Give me a break. This frenzy, this 'Roid Outrage -- and that would include investigations and any political currency shrewdly gained by the current crop of politicans -- seems to me to be rather curiously timed to Barry Bonds being on the cusp of breaking the home-run records of the most iconic figure(s) in all of American baseball history. Really, though, wouldn't you agree, it's mostly all about him passing Babe Ruth, the mighty Babe, and then, oh-by-the-way, Hank Aaron? Isn't it about Barry Bonds breaking those records by "cheating"? Isn't it about fair play, and being "clean," and the "purity" of the game? Isn't it about whether Bonds' records are now "tainted"? Isn't it?

Well, then, let me suggest this to you, and it doesn't matter if what I say now causes such outrage in your heart that you go Romo on me, want to throw your laptop and break my left orbital socket with it. Might be a good idea, as far as you're concerned, but it won't change the truth of it.

Ruth's records are tainted. Aaron's records are tainted.. They were each amassed by human beings performing in imperfect human systems. So of course they're tainted. But I do not blame Babe Ruth, hold it against him, that his records were amassed in a league that prohibited the participation of much of the skilled labor force, the black and the brown, the Latin American or the Asian, the African-Americans from the same land of origin.

I can't hold that against Babe Ruth's records, and I'm pretty sure you can't either. That wasn't his fault. I mean, was he supposed to hold a bus boycott or something? Wasn't his fault the game was not pure. I can't really blame Babe Ruth if his prodigious and voracious appetites for food and alcohol and sex cost him another 86 home runs, which he probably would've hit had he trained harder and taken better care of himself. These are the variables of any given human life. The book says he hit 714 in the big leagues. I can only go by that. For that is the nature of baseball. It is a game that relies on the Book of Numbers, not personal lifestyle choices, to define its champions. All of a sudden, all the pure-number guys, the sabermetricians, are just like everybody else, going off emotion, feel -- they plain don't like Barry Bonds.

Babe Ruth. How many homers would the Babe have hit if he'd stayed in shape -- or played against African-Americans?

If there was a "pure" era, it was the era between 1947 and, say, 1980, when performance-enhancing drugs became prevalent. That was the era occuring after Jackie Robinson opened up the game, the era of Mantle, Mays, Aaron and Clemente, and to some degree, Barry Bonds' father, Bobby. We all know how Mantle and Bobby Bonds badly damaged their careers with alcohol. We cluck and say what a shame it was -- we do in Mantle's case, anyway. But the book on Mantle says 536 home runs. It is what it is. Aaron says 755, although Aaron played in a stadium called the Launching Pad and hit the last 22 home runs as a DH.

Now we are definitely in an era of performance-enhancing drugs; no need for any of us to be on any high horse about it. Without Toprol or Lotrel, anti- high-blood pressure drugs, or especially Nexium, I'm sure I'd be curled up in a ball somewhere. Do you want to get into all the performance enhancers you take? And is not all of your work still valid? Or, not? Am I supposed to believe nobody actually uses Cialis or Levitra or Viagra, that the companies making them are going broke? Why is it when NFL football players are shot up in their ankles and calves and knees and rib cages and shoulders and necks with pain-killers to numb themselves and then go out and sacrifice their damaged limbs so they can perform for us, we have no outrage over that?

Why is that not "cheating"?

No, something else is happening here.

For some, this is simply an attempt to negate the accomplishments of Barry Bonds. I tend to agree with Bobby Valentine -- I've seen Bonds do things no other human being can do, just as Ruth and Ted Williams and Mantle and Mays and Aaron did things no other human being can do. Muscles don't play baseball. Hands and eyes play baseball. Longevity books it.

Barry Bonds
Great merit: Six MVPs and ... 756 home runs?

So Barry Bonds remorselessly and relentless marches on, beyond the 660 home runs of Willie Mays, on past the 714 home runs of Babe Ruth, and finally, by the 755 home runs of Henry Aaron. Barry Bonds will become the greatest home-run hitter in baseball history.

And apparently, that's what outrages many people, deep down inside.

It has nothing to do with any steroids. Please. Oh please.

A long time ago I wrote a funny little book called "Why Black People Tend To Shout." Now, if you hear that title and you don't laugh -- then you need to read that book! It is a humorous book. I was taught by the master, Mr. Mark Twain, that humor was the great leveler, that against the power of laughter, nothing can stand. Well, this 'Roid Outrage is funny to me.

What Barry Bonds has done is show great merit in the game. Unfortunately, when you are what is called "black," that can be inconvenient; often when you show merit, the rules on merit are changed to make them more obtuse.

When Aaron was approaching Ruth's home-run record in the early 1970s, all the stories were about how he had to endure all this racist hate mail and kidnapping threats against his daughter -- how he had to endure against the real protagonist, the Status Quo. It wasn't about how great a htter he was.

I'd say that's the part that's cheating. I'd say Aaron got cheated.

It's all fine and good to make up myths about so many events, athletic ones included, that don't contain any African-Americans, and I don't have to list them all here, and in fact don't have time, but sometimes I get the feeling some sports fans would like it better if all of sports history was rather like an episode of "Friends." Fine, when it comes to making movies, and giving out awards, and waxing nostalgic. But it seems to me when a man spends 20 years showing merit, in reality, not fiction, he ought to able to eat his grapes without people saying how sour they are, what a cheater he is, how impure his records are, how what he's doing doesn't count in the grand scheme.

No? That's exactly where he does count.

We don't judge Barry Bonds, friends.

I do fear we only judge ourselves.

Ralph Wiley has written articles for Sports Illustrated, Premiere, GQ, and National Geographic, and many national newspapers. He was one of the original NFL Insiders on NBC. His many books include "Serenity, A Boxing Memoir," "Why Black People Tend To Shout," "By Any Means Necessary: The Trials and Tribulations of the Making of Malcolm X" with Spike Lee, "Dark Witness," "Best Seat in the House" with Spike Lee, "Born to Play" with Eric Davis, and "Growing Up King" with Dexter Scott King and the children of Martin Luther King Jr. He contributes to many ESPN productions, and bats cleanup on a weekly basis for Page 2.

[Perfection]

Don't you find it odd that Bonds' trainer has said that he has given baseball players steroids, but he won't say who?