An Asterisk Looms Over Baseball

"If you're going to take away home runs from Bonds, how many do you take away?" said baseball historian David Vincent, author of the book, "Home Run: The Definitive History of Baseball's Ultimate Weapon."

"If you take one away, then you take it away from the pitcher," David Vincent said. "That changes the score of the game. It changes the standings. And oh, by the way, the Giants went to the World Series one of those years. . . . You can't undo the world. You can't make the world spin backwards like Superman ."

As home run totals skyrocketed in the 1990s -- and fans came to parks in record numbers -- the questions followed, culminating in a riveting session in front of a congressional committee in 2005, when sluggers such as McGwire and Sammy Sosa were asked about the impact of steroids on the game.

Bonds was not invited to testify. But the reality of baseball's problem was apparent. Yesterday's indictment was the most significant development since.

"We live in a culture where the biggest sin seems to be getting caught lying or cheating, and this would be a federal entity saying that Barry Bonds did both," said Richard Lapchick, a sports ethicist at the University of Central Florida. "We're talking about, arguably, the greatest player of his generation now being subject to this federal indictment. Though it's been expected by a lot of people, it says something about not only Barry Bonds, but about the failure of baseball for so long to monitor the situation that it became acceptable among players to take these kinds of steps."

It is becoming more and more obvious that, for some players, steroids were accepted. Since the end of the season, soft-tossing pitcher Paul Byrd of the Cleveland Indians has admitted to taking human growth hormone. Other players -- including former Nationals outfielder Jose Guillen -- have been identified by a San Francisco Chronicle investigation as receiving shipments of HGH and steroids.

The accusations surrounding Bonds and others have created a culture in baseball in which even the players whisper about each other.

"It kind of comes up on certain players," Bacsik said last night from his home in Texas. "'Do you think that it was all-natural? Do you think he maybe used something?' Does it come up on Barry Bonds? Yeah, people talk about it. But it comes up on other people, too.

"We're really going to single out Barry Bonds today. But it just seems like over the past couple years -- and especially this last month -- there's a lot of guys that have a lot of stuff that needs to be cleared up. I don't want to say, 'Oh, no, Barry Bonds has ruined baseball' if everything were true. It's one of those things where time will tell."

But what, exactly, will time tell?

"I think we are on the downside of this," Fay Vincent said. "I think the Mitchell report is going to be devastating and embarrassing, and this is the beginning of that. But baseball can take it. . . . Baseball would be more at risk by not doing what they're doing, not cleaning it up."