Barry Bonds limped out onto the diamond last week and the San Francisco crowd went wild as he hurled the ceremonial first pitch. The Giants are in the World Series now, the Bonds era a decade behind them. But the steroid era, for which Bonds is the poster boy, lingers. But Bonds shouldn’t be the poster boy, according to an article by Michael Powell in the New York Times. Everybody–Tony LaRussa, Joe Torre, everybody–looked the other way. It was just that time in history, an era, when steroid use was ubiquitous.
Commissioner Bud Selig “led baseball into its age of darkness and — pushed by congressional hearings and federal investigations — back toward the light,” according to Powell. Selig takes credit for the light but Bonds, mostly alone, gets blamed for the darkness. It’s wrong to point to any one man this way. When Bond threw that pitch “it was an overdue return for a man treated more harshly than many others part of an era of hypocrisy.” Lance Armstrong tweeted the story, adding “Spot on.”
Spot on @powellnyt. http://t.co/jbQMYG5O9z
— Lance Armstrong (@lancearmstrong) October 21, 2014
