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Bonding With the Babe
by Dave Zirin

In a March column titled "Time for Selig to Bury
Bonds," New York Daily News sports pasha Mike Lupica
wrote, "They will cheer [Bonds] in San Francisco when
he passes Babe Ruth, and we will hear again that his
most vituperative critics hate him, the arrogant black
star, for passing the portly white guy who has been
one of the famous names in American sports since the
'20s. As if Bonds is breaking some kind of record by
passing Ruth. As if we care about that anymore."

But as Bonds, now with 713 home runs, staggers on
buckling knees toward Ruth's epic 714 total, Lupica
has been proved painfully wrong. Even though the
actual home run record is Hank Aaron's 755, the
baseball world is on edge as Bonds approaches the
Great Bambino.

Baseball commissioner Bud Selig, whose gray, shadowed
countenance looks like a map of Mordor, announced that
there would be no ceremony when Bonds passes Ruth.
"Hank Aaron broke Babe Ruth's record," Selig said. "We
don't celebrate anybody the second or third time in."

But as Selig well knows, the church of baseball puts
its faith in a catechism of sacred numerology. The
most historically important arguably is 714. As Josh
DuBow of the Associated Press writes, "More than three
decades have passed since 714 represented baseball's
career home run record. Yet there is still something
magical about Babe Ruth's old record. 'The average
person probably knows 714 more than 755...but 755 is
the record,' Cubs manager Dusty Baker said." It
doesn't take Kreskin to divine the message Selig is
sending by ignoring Bonds's run on history. In a
Chicago Tribune piece called "This Snub's for You,"
Phil Rogers seethes, "Babe Ruth, celebrated as the
grandest character in baseball lore, is being chased
by an anti-hero whose act has grown tired and, at
times, pretty much pathetic."

Even though Bonds has never been convicted of any
crime, has never tested positive for a banned
substance and has played the game at a higher level
than any player of his chemically enhanced generation,
he is the game's pariah, the media-appointed "symbol
of the steroid era." Now that the owners have mined
their billions from the 1990s home run binge, and
everyone has a Congressional hangover, Bonds is
persona non grata.

The thought of Bonds passing Ruth clearly makes
Selig's pallor turn an even murkier shade of gray.
Babe Ruth, Lupica's assurances aside, remains the most
treasured and important figure in baseball history.
Home runs are still called "Ruthian." Yankee Stadium
is still the House That Ruth Built. Ruth is the man
with the fifty-four-ounce bat, someone so portly the
famed Yankee pinstripes were first stitched on just to
make him appear less rotund.

Yet Ruth is also someone treasured through a vapor of
nostalgia so thick that he has become myth to the
disservice of all except those who use his dewy memory
to bash present-day players for their moral failings.
The truth is far more complicated. The description of
a mercurial, complicated, egomaniacal star whose
personal behavior might skirt legality is one that
matches not only Bonds but Ruth as well.

Ruth's 714 home run record lacks the spit-shined
purity his backers trumpet. The Sultan of Swat made
his bones playing against only a select segment of the
population because of the ban on players whose skin
color ran brown to black. Ruth never had to hit
against Negro League greats Satchel Paige or Lefty
Mathis to amass the magic 714. Yet no asterisk for
institutionalized racism mars the Babe's marks. Ruth
also was a habitual user of a banned substance that
was deemed unambiguously illegal by the federal
government--a drug Ruth believed enhanced his
performance: alcohol. Ruth was a star during the
roaring prohibition 1920s, and as teammate Joe Dugan
said, "Babe would go day and night, broads and booze."

But Ruth didn't just stop at the watering hole to
find an edge. According to The Baseball Hall of
Shame's Warped Record Book, by Bruce Nash, Allan Zullo
and Bob Smith, the Bambino fell ill one year
attempting to inject himself with extract from a
sheep's testes. This effort by more than a few
athletes of his era to seek the healing and
strengthening properties of testosterone prefigured
the craze for steroids. When Ruth fell ill from his
attempted enhancement, the media was told that Ruth
merely had "a bellyache." This was believable since
Ruth was a glutton, famed for eating eighteen-egg
omelets. The Sultan of Swat was also a glutton for
women and violence, and he could be roused to
fisticuffs if it was suggested, as it often was, that
he was part black. The Babe's famous trade-out of
Boston in 1920 was justified by Sox owner Harry Frazee
by saying that Ruth was "one of the most selfish and
inconsiderate athletes I have ever seen."

Of course in Ruth's day, without twenty-four-hour
sports yipping and with sportswriting reduced to
sonnets of heroism for a country weary after World War
I, his flaws were essentially invisible to an adoring
public. But Bonds's flaws are picked over, his every
strikeout met with cheers by a herd of likeminded
writers who who act more like the White House press
corps than independent journalists.

It's a shame, because this could be an opportunity to
reacquaint a new generation of fans with the singular
Ruth. It could be an opportunity to explain that all
heroes are flawed and no era is pristine. Instead, the
media is smothering Bonds, and the rest of us, under
the weight of a bowdlerized Babe.