Bonds Receives Ovation In Return To AT&T Park

[RealGM Wiretap]

Barry Bonds did not expect a hero's welcome upon his return to AT&T Park in a baseball uniform for the first time since his last game with the Giants in 2007. 

"I don't really have fans in San Francisco; this is my family," Bonds, in his first season as the Marlins' hitting coach, said in the visitors dugout before Friday's loss to the Giants. "This is where I was raised, this is where I grew up, people that stood behind me through thick and thin. And so I always will appreciate that and always have my love for San Francisco."

On Friday, Bonds was welcomed back like the prodigal son returning home when he came out to deliver his new team's lineup card to the umpires.

He was given a warm embrace by Giants bench coach Ron Wotus as the crowd realized what was going on at home plate. Thunderous applause broke out and chants of "Bar-ry, Bar-ry, Bar-ry" filled the air as the crowd gave him a standing ovation.

Via ESPN.com

[Chi Dynasty12]

I wouldn't cheer for him, McGuire, Sosa, or A-Rod. Roger Maris is still the home run king and we all know why.

[mawbsta]

Where there is sports, there is cheating

Postulating that athletes from previous generations were not actively trying to get an edge through performance enhancement is like religious medieval biggots holding steadfast that the world was flat when all of the scholars accepted the Earth's roundness as an established fact of cosmology.

It is fact that cheating is as old as sport itself. Whether it's ancient Olympians or Roman Gladiators consuming opium based concoctions and animal organs, or the rise of strychnine, heroin, cocaine, and caffeine in the 19th century, to the Nazi's testing steroids on War prisoners to the emergence of amphetamines in the mid 20th century.

The first FDA approved Anabolic Steroid was available for sale in the US in 1958 and made readily available to all your baseball hero's of yesteryear including Maris who entered the Major Leagues as an impressionable young athlete in 1957. Drug testing in sport did not start until 1968, the year Maris retired. That means for the duration of his career (1957-1968) not only were steroids available, they were in fact SO RAMPANT that measures had to be put in place WORLD WIDE to slow down their ungoverned consumption. Baseball has proven it was not immune nor resistant to cheating. The lack of scientific testing or "honor system" evidently did not preclude, nor prohibit athletes from gaining an advantage, and history has incontrovertibly demonstrated that athletes look to gain any advantage available to them, legal or otherwise, and that steroids, amphetamines and drugs were available to every US athlete from the 50's, 60's and 70's all the way through. The IOC didn't ban their use until 1975 and the first modern drug test wasn't launched until 1983, yet the US didn't outlaw the non-medical use of steroids until 1988 and where Baseball did not ban the use of steroids until 1991 - 23 years after Maris retired.

To advocate that big bombers from the 90's were the only ones trying to enhance their performance, or that your yesteryear hero's did not take measures to enhance their own performance, is both ludicrous and asinine.