Hold onto your asterisks, Giants fans. Barry Bonds' all-time home run record may be getting knocked out of the park.
In a bombshell interview with USA Today, MLB comissioner Bud Selig said he's considering a move to strip Barry Bonds of the all-time home run record in response to (several years old) evidence that Bonds used performance enhancing drugs. The record would then be awarded back to Hank Aaron of the Atlanta Braves, whom Bonds passed for the title in 2007.
Funny how Selig is just coming around to this idea now. Barry would theoretically lose the record based on positive steroid tests from 2000 to 2006, prior to his setting the record (Tests from 2000 to 2003 initally gave "false negative" results, but the 2003 results were reversed and in 2006 MLB tested Bonds positive). One would assume Selig had full knowledge of these tests, considering he was the freaking comissioner of freaking Major League Baseball this entire freaking time.
Cheating admissions have not resulted is stripping players of their records in the past. Pete Rose's records still stand, despite a lifetime ban. And in pitcher Gaylord Perry's 1974 book "Me and The Spitter," he bragged of using vaseline, saliva, and any other lubricants he could scare up to jimmy his fastball. Yet he remains in the Hall of Fame, and retains his Cy Young awards.
Selig also admits in the interview that he is "saddened" by Alex Rodriguez' admission that he tested positive for and had used steroids, but declined to mention whether he was saddened in 2003 when this very information first came across his desk.
Joe Kukura is a freelance writer who uses any lubricants he can scare up.
