The Hutchinson Report: Mitchell Report is Bitter Proof that Barry Bonds is Baseball’s Druggie Scapegoat

Date: Friday, December 14, 2007
By: Earl Ofari Hutchinson, Special to BlackAmericaWeb.com

If anything, the Mitchell Report, instead of partially vindicating Bonds, leaves him even further hung out to dry. None of the dozens of players mentioned in the report come anywhere remotely close to the public and media loathing that Bonds engendered. Long before the ink was dry on the first sentence in the Mitchell Report, the giddy orgy of Bond's vilification was brutal and relentless, and that was even before he was accused of any wrongdoing.

Baseball didn’t say zilch about banning the use of steroids before 2002. It had absolutely no zero testing procedures that mandated penalties for those caught cheating until 2004. It did not scrub the use of the performance drug HGH until 2005. Even then, punishments were spotty and capricious. That is until the feds began to take a harder look at the use of the junk in the sport, and Bonds began to inch closer to MLB icons Babe Ruth’s former home run record and later Hank Aaron’s home run record.

The "Get Bonds" hunt was then on with a full vengeance.

Bonds now began to run shoulder to shoulder with O.J. Simpson as the man much of the public loved to hate. He was a big, rich, famous, surly, blunt-talking, black superstar who routinely thumbed his nose at the media. That stirred deep latent and not so latent visceral contempt and revulsion for him.

Bonds didn’t help matters by seeming to take special delight in irritating the heck out of sportswriters, fans and the baseball establishment. His surly shoot-from-the-lip, thumb-your-nose at the sports crowd stance defied or defiled the pristine, story book nostalgia-dripped image of what sports heroes should be and how they should comport themselves. It made no difference that Bonds is no bigger a jerk in his boorish, sulking, spoiled behavior than other legendary superstars. But coming from him, it just seemed to rub nerves even rawer.

So here’s a prediction. The Mitchell Report will grab headlines for a day. It will set the chops of talking head sports commentators, sports writers and baseball buffs in full throttle. It will spark another round of angry calls from some public officials to crack down on drug use in the majors. It will draw solemn pledges from MLB officials to do whatever it takes to end the cheating. And, just as quickly, it will blow over.

What won’t blow over is the fingerpoint at Bonds. He looms even bigger in importance. His trial will be billed as a sort of steroids trial of the century. All the dirt, real or manufactured, about steroids and baseball, meaning Bonds, will be piled on the public and the legal table. A conviction will be even better. That would give MLB officials the perfect chance to distance themselves from the cheaters, or more accurately, the perceived grand symbol of drug cheating, Mr. Bonds. The only scenario that could be even more worthy of an A-list Hollywood script is for Bonds to come clean, admit that he knowingly used drugs, and do a public mea culpa for it.

The owners, MLB officials and many sports writers could then breathe a big sigh of "See, I told you so" relief and skip along, smug in the knowledge that an ugly, and tainted chapter in baseball’s saga is finally past. Batter up!

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Earl Ofari Hutchinson is author of the book, "The Latino Challenge to Black America: Towards a Conversation Between African-Americans and Hispanics."