No record no rights

Henry Aaron injects some refreshing sanity -- and historical perspective -- into the steroids and records debate.

On the night in 2007 that Barry Bonds broke Hank Aaron’s home run record, Aaron, by way of video message, congratulated Bonds. Aaron said the feat required “skill, longevity and determination.”

”I move over and offer my best wishes to Barry and his family on this historical achievement,” he continued. “My hope today, as it was on that April evening in 1974, is that the achievement of this record will inspire others to chase their own dreams.”

In an eye-opening column by Terence Moore in Friday’s Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Aaron repeated his contention that Bonds was the true home run king.

“There are things out there besides worrying about a home run record that somebody now holds,” Aaron told Moore. “Barry has the record, and I don’t think anybody can change that.”

Last week, in the wake of Alex Rodriguez’s admission that he used performance-enhancing drugs between 2001 and 2003, there were suggestions that Commissioner Bud Selig might consider suspending Rodriguez and adjusting baseball’s record books to restore Aaron as the career home run leader. While it seems unlikely either would happen, Selig said in Thursday’s USA Today that he did not dismiss the idea of erasing Bonds’s record of 762 homers. Bonds is awaiting a March 2 court date in connection with charges that he lied to a federal grand jury in December 2003 when he said he never knowingly used performance-enhancing drugs. He has pleaded not guilty.

Aaron said he hoped Selig would leave the record book alone and simply allow Bonds’s career to speak for itself.

“It’s sort of a tricky call when you start going down that road of who is legitimate,” Aaron said. “I don’t know if Barry would have hit as many home runs or hit them as far — if that’s the case that he did use steroids — but I still don’t think it has anything to do with him having the kind of baseball career that he had.”

He added of Bonds: “He could have had an excellent career, regardless of what he did. So it would be something that I don’t think the commissioner would like to get involved in, really.”

What continues to bother me about all of this is the total lack of interest the media -- and I don't just mean sports "journalists" -- in the utter trampling of players' rights by the government. From the leak of grand jury testimony during the BALCO case, to the more recent leak of Alex Rodriguez's name from the list of players testing positive in'03, there seems to be a concerted effort by the government to try players via the press. They're using the media to ruin players' reputations because they're having trouble -- or have no chance whatsoever -- to prevail in a court of law. Writes Doug Glanville -- a former teammate of Rodriguez and a thoughtful voice amidst the din of self-righteousness and hyperbole -- where is the outrage?

I understood that when the federal government was looking for evidence in the BALCO investigation it might tread on players’ toes at some point. It seemed like all of baseball had become guilty by association once Ken Caminiti alleged that 50 percent of the major league players were on steroids. Or maybe the feds would be looking to catch players like Barry Bonds or Jason Giambi. The union and the league both knew that keeping these results privileged would be difficult. But for not one but four anonymous sources to leak this information, as is apparently the case with A-Rod, is unfathomable.

I’m not surprised by baseball’s extensive drug culture. It’s part of the game’s history and has as much to do with insecurity as greed. Players have to capitalize on opportunity, and at the hypercompetitive major-league level that’s like threading a needle — no wonder they will do just about anything to get ahead. Not that this justifies taking performance-enhancing drugs.

But before we get self-righteous, we should look in the mirror and ask ourselves whether exposing A-Rod, or any player for that matter, is worth stepping all over rights, privacy, confidentiality and anonymity.

There is a lot of outrage out there about Alex. Not surprising. But what really surprises me is the lack of outrage about how a confidential and anonymous test could be made public. We seem to gloss over the fact that these players voted to re-open a collectively bargained agreement in a preliminary effort to address the drug problem. When privileged information is shared it effectively hurts anyone who has expected privacy in any circumstance, just as when someone made Britney Spears’s medical records public.

Yeah, yeah, I know. These pampered superstars cheated and now they're getting what they deserve, and...what will we tell the children? But that's just it. If players like Bonds and Rodriguez can have their rights trampled by a bunch of obsessive federal agents, then any of us can.

And it might be useful if journalists, rather then simply lick their chops at the idea of being fed grand jury testimony and medical records, would question how and why they're being manipulated by the government in the first place.