would you give bonds his record home run

Exactly.

 

why take them then?

 

because he has an ego to feed. Bonds breaking the HR record took him from being one of the best recent hitters of the game to the best of all time.

 

but they don't help you at all, according to The 5th Racist

 

That makes no sense, but that's no surprise considering who said it. It's essentially like saying that police not doing enough to stop burglaries excuses the burglar. Until you have some evidence that MLB encouraged steroid use and/or supplied steroids to players, then you have no leg to stand on.

Barry Bonds was a Hall of Fame player before taking steroids, but his home rate was nothing exceptional and already declining. Once he started using, it saw a huge spike, so to suggest that it did relatively little is obviously ignorant.

Steroids allows for significantly greater bat speed, meaning you can wait longer before committing to a swing. It's true that it wouldn't make you a Hall of Fame hitter, but they have an enormous effect on someone who is already an accomplished major leaguer.

 

The fact that he was/is a complete dickhead made me dislike him long before the word steroid was ever mentioned. I don't care if he'd have never touched them, I still wouldn't have been pulling for him.

 

Actually, I stole that take from Jim Rome. I agree 100% They wanted to bring baseball back from the death it served during and after the strike, so they turned a blind eye to Big Mac, Sammy Sosa and everyone else who it was pretty apparent blew up over a 2 year span.

 

For anyone who thinks that steroids wouldn't help in baseball, please tell me why baseball players lift weights.

 

HGH helps your vision and eye hand coordination. It's been proven. I wouldn't be able to hit 755 homers on steroids but he's being compared to other players who weren't on roids and they did it without them.

 

Jim Rome is one of the biggest idiots around, so I don't know why you would choose to quote him. Moreover, I don't know why people keep repeating the fallacy that McGwire and Sosa saved baseball. That is absolute nonsense. Ripken is the one who was credited with that until the last couple of years when the steroid apologists attempted to re-write history (there were also a number of new ballparks then that greatly boosted attendance).

As for turning a blind eye, I bitched about andro because it essentially is a steroid, but I have to admit that I was naive and/or stupid about how pervasive the problem was. And if you or I weren't expressing the belief back then that the steroid issue was as serious as we now know that it was, how can some people state definitively that people in baseball knew and did nothing? I imagine that some people had to know, and certainly that some people didn't want to make waves by bringing it up. But again, unless you have evidence that baseball directly supported steroid use, then you can't even begin to excuse the behavior of miscreants like Barry Bonds.