<p>[Bonds</a> blockbuster: ‘The Clear’ was legal - MLB - Yahoo! Sports](<a href=“Bonds blockbuster: 'The Clear' was legal - Yahoo Sports”>Bonds blockbuster: 'The Clear' was legal - Yahoo Sports)</p>
<p>While I don’t have enough info to say guilty or innocent, I am seriously wondering why $55M of my tax dollars have been spent on this…</p>
<p>I have been following this a bit and I think people have been too hard on Barry Bonds. I am glad to see this story.</p>
<p>I think Barry Bonds is the greatest baseball player who ever lived. As to whether or not he ever used steroids, I think we’ll never know. But the case is pretty convincing that he is not guilty of what he is charged with, and I hope he wins a huge lawsuit against MLB for blackballing him.</p>
<p>I have never understood Barry Bonds. All that talent yet so few people seem to like him. He comes across as a strange person sometimes.</p>
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<p>Barry Bonds was an excellent player. But Barry Bonds plus his back-room pharmacist was the greatest player who ever lived.</p>
<p>If Barry took The Clear then there is no doubt that he took performance-enhancing steroids, because that’s exactly what The Clear is. Just ask Marion Jones - that’s what she got busted for. The point of the article is not that Barry didn’t take steroids; it’s that the steroid he took was new and not yet illegal at the time he took it. It is now totally illegal.</p>
<p>The Clear was a new, slight chemical modification of other steroids that were highly illegal. Being declared “not guilty” of sports doping because you were taking The Clear is the chemical equivalent of beating the rap on a major felony due a very minor technicality. It would be like saying you weren’t really a bank robber because the bank you robbed was actually a Savings and Loan, and the anti-bank robbery law didn’t mention anything about S&Ls.</p>
<p>May I politicize Barry Bond’s problem?</p>
<p>The MLB is one step behind BALCO chemists. This is nothing new. McGuire and Sosa’s steroids weren’t illegal when they took them either.</p>
<p>Better baseball through chemistry (to paraphrase DuPont ;))</p>
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<p>Yes, indeed. At best, the MLB has long been two-faced about these issues. They were more than willing to turn a blind eye on all of this when it seemed to be in their interest to do so – when, that is, the chemically fueled Mark McGwire/Sammy Sosa home-run battle 10 years ago brought fans back to the game after the loss in interest that followed the strike and other problems.</p>
<p>The MLB wanted the chemically enhanced performances. They just didn’t want the players to get caught using these substances.</p>
<p>Now that players have been getting caught (not by the MLB but by others), the MLB’s belated attempts to appear righteous and pure on these issues are more than a little ludicrous.</p>
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<p>Correct. This is nothing new across nearly all sports. Steroids first hit big in weight lifting and body building as far back as the 1950s. They crept into track and field in the 60s and 70s and swimming in the 70s - both sports reaching their dope-drenched peak in the 80s. And in the 80s and 90s they made the big push into NFL and MLB. And throughout all of this the chemists have mostly stayed one step ahead of the rule makers and the testers. It’s a constant cat and mouse game with the bad guys usually winning.</p>
<p>Remember Ben Johnson, the disgraced sprinter from 1988? He kept crying he was framed. Not because he wasn’t using dope - he was up to his eyeballs in dope, but because he knew the dope he was using was undetectable. And the drug they detected in his urine was an older formulation that he no longer used. Hence he was convinced his urine specimen must have been spiked. No fair!</p>
<p>Some sports have managed to partially clean themselves up by means of very aggressive testing. Track for example managed to cut drug use down some in the 90s. You could see it reflected in the performances. For example the gold medal winning women’s shot put toss in the '96 Atlanta Olympic games would have been good for about 6th place in the '80 Moscow games. But as the subsequent BALCO/Marion Jones scandal showed, track still has a big problem - a problem that centered around the use of the drug “The Clear.” The same drug that now is laughably being put forward as evidence that Barry is clean.</p>
<p>The Clear was not classified as a steroid until January 2005. So even if he used it (and it is not “clear” that he did), he didn’t use a steroid. It is rather like using ketchup before Ronald Reagan - it wasn’t a vegetable until the government declared it was.</p>
<p>The Clear’s chemical structure and biological effects did not change in 2005. The chemical compound that is currently called The Clear is and always has been a steroid - a type of organic compound fitting a certain chemical structure. (I can give you a detailed chemical definition of a steroid if you like). It is and always was a derivative of testosterone and thus very likely to have performance enhancing properties. What changed in 2005 was that it became easier to officially classify new drugs as anabolic steroids even though rigorous clinical trials of their muscle-building properties had not yet been done.</p>
<p>Testosterone itself is a chemically a steroid and so are all its derivatives. And when they cook up a new one it’s pretty easy to know that it’s going to be a performance booster long before it meets the pre-2005 standard for official classification. </p>
<p>Bonds’ defenders are engaging in semantic sophistry here. Like the bank/S&L robbery analogy, it’s quibbling about technicalities of terminology, and does nothing to prove that Barry was clean. In fact, if he took The Clear, it proves just the opposite.</p>
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<p>To say that someone is not “guilty” if what he was doing was not clearly prohibited at the time is not “semantic sophistry.” Among judges and lawyers, this principle has a different name: the rule of law. </p>
<p>(And as I mentioned above, MLB was at a minimum complicit in the players’ use of performance-enhancing drugs because, for their own selfish reasons, they wanted more home runs to fly out of the ballparks. More home runs meant more money.)</p>
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<p>(P.S. Bonds’ real problem here isn’t that he was using performance-enhancing drugs. It’s that he’s apparently so unlikeable and unpopular as a person that, when the sh-t started to hit the fan, no one was willing to come to his defense.)</p>
<p>True, true, true; but he will never be admitted to the Hall of Fame because the rule of law does not apply, and the mythology of baseball is unforgiving, as it should be. Richard Nixon will always be a crook even though he never did time.</p>
<p>Bonds is accused of 10 counts of perjury and 1 count of obstruction of justice. I’ve been reading up on it today for a few hours and have increasing come around to the side that he is not guilty of many of those charges. </p>
<p>The questions he was being asked were vague and imprecise. I can’t blame him for not being precise in his answers - it is not his job as a witness to make the attorney successful. </p>
<p>Did he take performance enhance drugs? I’s say almost certainly - but that doesn’t make him guilty of the crimes with which he is being charged. The feds, in my opinion, should have walked away from this case years - and multiple millions of dollars ago. Time and history will judge Barry - and nothing productive is going to come out of this case.</p>
<p>Oh, and by the way, it is interesting to also read about the history of various performance enhancing drugs in baseball - they go back to the 40s - and many of the heros of the game, including many hall of famers, took them - they just weren’t steroids. The more I think about it the more the inconsistency just jumps out at me - a few baseball players are being dragged through the mud - and dozens of other players are getting off scot-free. (Not to mention football players…)</p>
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<p>While I agree that Bonds’ use of performance-enhancing drugs may be relevant to assessments of his career and of his worthiness for the Hall of Fame, the Nixon analogy seems off the mark – if, that is, it is the case that what Bonds was doing wasn’t clearly prohibited at the time.</p>
<p>What makes someone a “crook,” if this term is being used synonymously with “criminal,” is not whether or not they “did time”; it’s whether or not they committed a crime. Nixon may well have done so (at the moment my recollection of the legal particulars of his situation is more than a bit foggy), so he may well indeed be a “crook.” The fact that he received a pardon (and so avoided prosecution) isn’t relevant to the question of whether or not he violated the criminal laws. </p>
<p>But Bonds’ situation may well be different. If Bonds didn’t violate the then-existing rules, he is not a “crook.” And no amount of righteous disapproval concerning his efforts to improve his performance by using every non-prohibited means of doing so changes this fact.</p>
<p>Nixon did in fact commit a crime–several, actually; the reference, however, was strictly for visceral/rhetorical purpose. Nixon and Bonds, and many other public figures, stand as great American stories of the Darkside; their privilege and abilities are/were extraordinary but their weaknesses were as common as sour milk. History is full of them–the ones that don’t sour are, in my opinion, far rarer and more worthy of our attention.</p>
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<p>The semantic sophistry here is Bonds’ (or his lawyers) asserting he didn’t take “steroids” when indeed they and everyone else on both sides of the sports doping business knows full well that The Clear is a typical testosterone-derived STEROID of that same chemical family that produced all the other anabolic steroids. They are twisting their argument around a poorly-crafted and subsequently-abolished regulatory classification to try falsely claim that Bonds is not a doper because the new form dope he took had not had extensive clinical trials to prove it is muscle-building.</p>
<p>If you went into your backroom chemistry lab and cooked up a slight chemical modification of cocaine that still gave you a pretty good high, would it be fair to call you you a drug abuser? Your lawyers would argue no, but anyone with normal common sense would see that they are relying on mere semantics and technicalities to make that argument.</p>
<p>His lawyers’ cleverness may well be sufficient to keep Bonds out of jail, but that by no means shows he is “innocent.” He was swimming in the sports dope sewer and he knew it.</p>
<p>“The semantic sophistry here is Bonds’ (or his lawyers) asserting he didn’t take “steroids” when indeed they and everyone else on both sides of the sports doping business knows full well that The Clear is a typical testosterone-derived STEROID of that same chemical family that produced all the other anabolic steroids.”</p>
<p>It is clear and unequivocal that The Clear was not only not illegal, but was NOT considered a steroid by law until January 2005. Prior to then, it was no more considered a steroid under the law than milk (which is a performance-enhancing substance, or so my mother always told me.)</p>