Let Barry be

SPRING IS UPON US, and with it, another season of hand-wringing over the San Francisco Giants’ Barry Bonds, steroids and what the two together symbolize about the downfall of Western civilization.

I respectfully submit that the folks making these arguments haven’t thought things through.

Baseball purists contend that steroids give a player an unfair advantage over his contemporaries and, worse, facilitate an artificially enhanced assault on some of the sport’s sacred records. Bonds’ angriest critics suggest that if the allegations against him are finally proved, his single-season home run record (73) should be expunged. Further, they argue, if Bonds breaks Hank Aaron’s career home run record, that achievement should carry an asterisk identifying it as tainted.

Trouble is, the reasoning that underlies such arguments is itself tainted.

The level playing field that supposedly links baseball’s past and present is a fiction, given cyclical fluctuations in mound height, ballpark dimensions and such. But more to the point, the ever-advancing science that supports player performance and longevity has evolved to the point where distinctions between treatment and enhancement, maintenance and modification -- even between natural and artificial -- blur to the point of meaninglessness.

Right now, in the same newspapers that contain articles damning steroids and hailing the sanctity of baseball’s records, you’ll find upbeat features on athletes who have extended and/or enhanced their careers through ulnar collateral ligament reconstruction, better known as “Tommy John surgery.” During an hour under the knife, body parts are rearranged, then the player rehabs for a year and presto! -- perhaps an extra decade of useful elbow life. Surely this surgery allows players to mount an “unnatural” assault on baseball’s record books, to compile wins and strikeouts long after counterparts from previous generations (Sandy Koufax comes to mind) would’ve been undone by worn joints? John himself recorded 147 of his 231 career wins after his revolutionary 1974 procedure.

Moreover, pitchers say they throw harder post-operatively. Reliever Billy Koch, who hit the upper 90s with his original-equipment arm, was clocked at 100-plus mph after the surgery. Tellingly, Koch joked to USA Today: “I recommend it to everybody, regardless [of] what your ligament looks like.”

Or consider Lasik and other vision enhancements, which allow almost any athlete to own the visual acuity that helped make Ted Williams a nonpareil hitter and judge of the strike zone. Let me emphasize: This isn’t a case of athletes with subpar vision trying to be normal. It’s a case of athletes with normal vision trying to be exceptional.

Throw in the quantum improvements in sports nutrition, (non-steroid-assisted) workout technology and gear -- shoes, gloves and bats, plus the various guards, braces and other contrivances that have today’s ballplayers striding to the plate looking vaguely bionic -- and I would ask Bonds’ detractors: Would you have baseball revert to what it was in Abner Doubleday’s era?

The irony is that all this may be much ado about little anyway, because the straight-line relationship that many draw between enhancements and performance does not exist.

This is true even of steroids. If admitted user Jose Canseco can be believed, hundreds of major league players became juicers during the last generation. None has approached what Bonds has achieved. Critics use Ken Caminiti as a poster boy for reckless steroid abuse, blaming the drugs for his untimely death; Caminiti topped out at 40 home runs in his MVP-winning season, 1996.

Say what you will about Bonds, he has realized his physical potential to a degree that no other player can claim. Perhaps it wasn’t steroids per se that enabled him to transcend but, rather, his almost superhuman dedication to training. There is simply no way to separate out the variables as neatly as some would urge.

Yes, it’s true that steroids are illegal and have harmful side effects. It’s also true that we live in a society that allows us to self-destruct by any number of means. Here again, the distinctions we draw are impossibly arbitrary. In a culture that continues to celebrate the consumption of alcohol despite the documented damage it does, how can we plausibly vilify a guy who takes steroids with a specific athletic goal in mind?

Leave Bonds alone, folks. And leave sports alone. Tolerate, if not embrace, a Darwinistic climate wherein every player attempts to achieve what he can, however he can. “Survival of the fittest.” No other approach makes sense.