The Bonds Indictment: A Step in the Right Direction

Next will come the Mitchell report. Again, the best thing for baseball would be if it named as many players as possible. Because here's a fact: almost any player you suspect or suspected is guilty. That's not my opinion, that's the opinion of players currently in the game. The best description I've ever heard about what it was like at the height of the steroids era comes from Ron Darling, the ex-New York Mets and Oakland Athletics pitcher:

"When I first came up in the 80s, the clubhouse after a game was place where you sat around and ate the postgame food and talked about the game and maybe where you were going to go out that night," Darling said. "When I got to Oakland [the 'Bash Brothers' team, led by McGwire and Jose Canseco] in 1992, it was completely different. Guys would come into the clubhouse after a game, change into sweats and go straight to the weight room. They would work out for an hour and then do it again the next day before the game. Every day they worked out at least twice day.

"After a while it occurred to me that there's just no way you can work out that hard, that often, and recover in order to play every day. That's what a lot of people don't understand about steroids: what they do as much as anything is allow you to recover so you can work out much, much harder."

Go back and check what the defenders of Bonds and other steroid users said consistently about them: "Oh, you don't understand, he works out so hard. That's why he's gotten so big, that's why he looks so different."

Wrong again. Yes, the workouts made a difference but the steroids were what allowed the workouts to take place.

It was Mercutio who said, "a pox on both your houses," as he lay dying, another victim of the endless war between the Capulets and the Montagues in Rome and Juliet. In a baseball sense, the players and owners have been the Capulets and the Montagues throughout the steroid era. They have fought one another and kept insisting the other party was guilty all the while the sport was being flushed by the steroid users.

Mercutio's pox has been on their houses for several years now. It isn't gone yet and won't be completely gone for a while. But the indictment of Bonds and the arrival of the Mitchell report are a huge step in the right direction. Throw in a conviction of Bonds -- whether by trial or by plea -- and, unlike Romeo and Juliet, baseball still can be saved.