By Michael Wilbon
Friday, May 12, 2006

It has been less a home run race than an open forum -- on the effects of steroids, the fairness of media coverage, the iconic place of the Babe and, of course, race. And race is never, ever the least of it.

Hitting Nos. 714 and 715, whenever that happens, won't stop the swirl of speculation either. A great many people who support Barry Bonds think the Major League Baseball investigation into steroid use is targeting him because he's black. They'll tell you the volume of media criticism is louder than it should be because Bonds is black. And they'll tell you that some folks, whether or not they'll admit it publicly, simply don't want Bonds to surpass Babe Ruth, a white man.

Conversely, a great many people who are against Bonds or tired of Bonds or simply don't care about Bonds say he's a cheater who brought all this criticism down on himself, and ought to be held at arm's length. The 2,000 or so empty seats at the beautiful ballpark in San Francisco in recent days may speak to a certain apathy about Bonds, even where he lives, among people who generally like him.

For sure, it's a rather uncomfortable story. There's almost nothing joyous about it. You know there's friction when Jesse L. Jackson is sitting in the stands in San Francisco, on hand to speak occasionally on Bonds's behalf, to have his back, if you will.

Then again, it always seems uncomfortable when the subject is home run records. As Henry Aaron did 32 years ago when approaching the Babe, Bonds is receiving hate mail now, proof beyond a shadow of a doubt (as if we need it) that bigotry is alive and well. But we know it's not only race when it comes to loyalty to Ruth because Roger Maris, a white man, received hate mail in 1961 when he approached Ruth's single season mark of 60 home runs. Maris's hair fell out in clumps that summer because of the pressure, and resentment, that he felt.

Personally, while I don't dislike Bonds, I'm suspicious of him and suspicious of his home run total. I believe absolutely that he used steroids and have no inclination to celebrate any home run marks he surpasses, and feel the same way about Mark McGwire, Rafael Palmeiro, Sammy Sosa and everybody else who has given us reason to be suspicious.

And where does race enter the picture?

Bonds probably didn't play on a level playing field.

And Babe Ruth, who only had to play against white players, didn't play on one either.

Baseball enforced a policy that cheated men of color for 60 years, and allowed cheating to create this new suspicion over the last, oh, 15 years.

Still, it's impossible to examine any of this without looking at race. There's even irony here involving Ruth. As Leigh Montville writes in his new book "The Big Bam: The Life and Times of Babe Ruth," his first nickname was contracted from "Nigger Lips" to "Nigger" to "Nig," and that's simply what Ruth was called every day for years.

Montville quotes Ruth's sister, Mamie, as saying that Ruth's skin was "olive, like our mother's side of the family." And Ruth's wide nose and full lips gave him what a great many white folks and some blacks thought was a mixed-race look. In his early years of baseball, whites shouted racial epithets at Ruth all the time from the stands. And any long discussion of Ruth in, say, black barber shops was sure to include a sort of jocular speculation over Ruth's race.

This isn't new information; it's just been forgotten. Ruth has been dead since 1948. It's not like there was any "Sunday Night Conversation" with the Babe on videotape for the historical record. But while Ruth's maternal grandparents were German immigrants, his father's family lived in 19th-century Baltimore and there's no exact record of lineage.

In recent years, as Ruth has been more prominently in the news because of Bonds's pursuit, there's been increased back-and-forth. Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist Clarence Page even reexamined an old story alleged by Fred Lieb, a sportswriter of the 1920s. Lieb reported that Ty Cobb refused to share a cabin with Ruth at a Georgia hunting lodge because he thought Ruth was black.

There are a few people still alive who had actual interaction with Ruth, and Buck O'Neil, the Negro leagues star and perhaps baseball's greatest living resource, is one of them. O'Neil, now 94, was 10 years old when he first met Ruth outside of a spring training stadium in Sarasota, Fla., where O'Neil grew up. Ruth gave O'Neil a cracked bat that afternoon. He and his buddies put a nail through the crack and used it. "We wore that bat out," O'Neil said the other day.

In 1936, the year after Ruth retired, he brought the Babe Ruth All-Stars to play the Satchel Paige All-Stars on the far South Side of Chicago at a company ballpark. O'Neil, then 24 and a member of the Kansas City Monarchs, played in that game against Ruth. "The ballpark was packed," O'Neil said. "Tall cedar trees lined the outfield, and on Satchel's first pitch to Ruth, he hit it completely over those outfield trees. Satchel greeted Ruth at the plate, and they stopped the game. . . . Satchel and Ruth talked at home plate for 15 minutes."

So did Negro leaguers talk about Ruth's race? Did they think he was, well, one of them, another light-skinned Negro passing for white, which is something 99 percent of white folks know absolutely nothing about?

"We heard the rumors," O'Neil said, "but we didn't think anything of them. . . . There were a lot of Ruth haters. But did we believe that stuff? No. . . . To us, Ruth was a white man. He wasn't the only white man with a flat nose and full lips."

O'Neil, stupidly passed over by the Hall of Fame voters recently, is one of the few links between Ruth and Aaron and Bonds, someone who has met all three, someone who played long before the word "steroids" was uttered, yet has lived long enough to see the game affected by its use.

"If he is . . . if he is," O'Neil said of Bonds and steroids, "he's not the only one. Any athlete wants that extra lift. Ruth liked a little drink when he played. . . . The only reason we didn't use [steroids] is that we didn't have it."

It almost guarantees that every home run Bonds hits until he retires will bring the kind of scrutiny Ruth and Aaron never had in their final days.