Baseball juices, Bonds wins the lottery, and here comes the lynch mob

[JackRiddler]

Now the media nation can scapegoat one player for a common practice that without a doubt was condoned and covered for by the baseball teams themselves. Bonds has won the steroids lottery twice - first by getting the HR record (as opposed to cancer, as Jason Giambi did), and now by being the designated scapegoat for a whole culture of "performance enhancement."

I speak not about the details of a pending perjury case but of the circus around it, and the role it has already played in our society for more than a year.

We may see a period of further months or even two years in which Barry Bonds is pressed into the same function for racist America as was played in the 1990s by OJ Simpson. Except Bonds didn't commit murder, but was only one of dozens or hundreds involved in the ML baseball juicing complex, which is debatably a moral crime and not much of a legal one.

Is juicing by pros wrong? Yes, especially for its pernicious influence on the 99 percent of those who do steroids or the like - young athletes who are in high school and college, who will never make a major league, who have no chance of earning millions in exchange for the damage to their bodies.

Did everybody in the game juice? Absolutely not, and there is no moral justification.

Did many juice (and still do thanks to HGH), with cover from their teams and the league, without which it would have been impossible on this scale? And did the league knowingly profit from the performance bonanza?

You be the judge: white America's perfect image of a surly, powerful black man now burns at the stake, while Selig and the franchises feign innocence and continue cashing in, wringing their hands and trying to hide within the rest of the electronic lynch mob.

Did I just accuse all franchises? No. We'll never know just how heavy it was, but is there an elephant in the room?