Are you crying? There's no ethics! There's no ethics in baseball!

There’s a whole lot of nonsense going on here. Pretty much any time a person starts going on about Barry Bonds, especially if he considers himself an ethicist, like Jack Marshall, he’s going to say a lot of stupid things. Most people don’t seem to be able to help themselves. This is going to be long, and about baseball, so yeah, fair warning. I’m not gonna do the whole thing, because it’s excessive, so I’m going to jump into the middle:

But it was not to be. All that changed was the theme. This time, it was, "What team will sign Barry?"

It turns out that none of them did, but most would have been drastically improved with him. Like, imagine if the Mets had signed him after Alou had gotten hurt and Church started piling up concussions. As much as I hate to say it, Bonds in that lineup with Wright, Beltran, Reyes, and Delgado’s second half of the season, almost certainly would have added a couple wins. For a team that missed the wildcard by one game, that would have been kind of a big deal. Hell, or the Rays, adding Bonds as a DH would have been a pretty big improvement.

followed by, as the season progressed, "Why hasn’t anybody signed Barry?"

Because they’re dumb. That’s really the only explanation I can come up with.

and the Player’s Union’s jaw-droppingly brain-dead, “How dare you not sign Barry?”

Why is that brain-dead? They have a legitimate complaint about collusion. Bonds is too great a player for no team to have made an offer to him.

As it had been obvious to me from the first day of Spring Training that no team would or should sign Barry Bonds, this chorus was as puzzling as it was perplexing. Are baseball commentators really so disconnected from the ethical imperatives of the game? Do they really not grasp what signing Barry Bonds, for any amount of money or no amount at all, would have meant? The answers, sad to say, appear to be yes and yes. They, or many of them, just didn’t get it. And they still don’t.

Right, baseball is a bastion of ethics. From Ty Cobb charging into the bleachers to attack black people (he was a bit of a racist), to owners basically holding players in indentured servitude until Curt Flood. Then there’s Charles Comiskey paying his players so poorly that they were reduced to throwing the World Series, owners refusing to sign a black player until 1947 (and years later for some franchises), and pretty much everything Pete Rose did after the 1980 World Series. So yeah, when I hear baseball I think upstanding ethics. It’s a word association type thing.

This was brought horribly home when The Hardball Times Annual arrived, and there was the usually reasonable John Brattain condemning major league general managers for not signing Bonds, because, you see, he might have made a difference, even gotten the Mets, or the Jays, or some other also-ran, into the postseason. But just as, in Sir Thomas More’s words, "it profits a man nothing to give his soul for the whole world," signing Bonds in order to make the playoffs would have been a dubious and foolish deal for any team, even if one buys the questionable assumption that he would have played well enough to hold up his end of it.

I’ve never read anything by John Brattain, but he seems like a smart guy. He’s absolutely right, though I don’t think that Bonds would have made enough of a difference for the Jays. Would have made it interesting though. So, rather than objectively looking at how Bonds would have benefited a baseball team, Marshall references a sixteenth century humanist. One who burned people at the stake. He doesn’t seem to be much of an authority of baseball or ethics.

The reason this is, or should be, obvious is the Mitchell Report, and what it signified to the baseball community.

The Mitchell Report had one purpose: get Congress to leave Bud Selig alone. And it worked. Let’s not talk about that anymore.

Cynics may scoff, and Barry himself couldn’t care less, but baseball is the one professional sport that carries with it a duty to the American culture. Character counts in America, and baseball is bound by history, tradition and its role in legend and myth to make certain that character counts on its playing fields as well.

Again, that’s not true at all, and it never has been. Character doesn’t matter in baseball, coordination does.

Baseball players, as Bill James quite accurately stated, are paid to be heroes. The sport does not have the raw physical display of football, or the speed of basketball, or the simple-minded appeal of soccer. What it does have that no other professional sport even values very much is integrity, or at least an appreciation that integrity is important.

Seriously, he keeps bringing this up, and I don’t get it. Where did this integrity come from? Was it Doc Ellis pitching a no-hitter on acid? Or maybe he was thinking of Rafael Palmeiro’s 1999 Gold Glove award and his testimony to Congress? I love baseball, but I can’t say that integrity is part of the game, no matter how much I may want to.

This does not mean that athletes of bad character don’t find their way onto baseball rosters, but it does mean that they need to 1) be very good and 2) not put their lack of character on public display if they want to stay there. When the Boston Red Sox were considering drafting pitcher Clay Buchholz in 2005, they were very concerned about an incident in high school in which Buchholz stole some school equipment, and consequently the team almost didn’t draft him. Other teams stayed away because of the offense.

But the Red Sox did draft him, and he’s already thrown one no-hitter. In the end they ignored any character issues to take the best baseball player available. Not coincidentally, they’ve won two World Series in the last four years. Because they fill out their rosters based on who plays baseball well. And, again, this correlates to winning.

Can anyone imagine a pro football team hesitating for one second from drafting a promising prospect because of something like this?

Yes, actually, football teams make stupid decisions too. Just look at how many teams passed over Randy Moss. Hell, the Eagles drafted Mike Fucking Mamula instead of Warren Sapp.

There simply are no equivalents of Pacman Jones in baseball. Players who have serious criminal charges, who are accused of rape and spousal abuse, drunk driving and drug arrests just fade out of the game.

I think that pretty much the entire roster of the 1986 Mets invalidates this. Seriously, just look at the Legal and Personal Problems section on Darryl Strawberry’s wikipedia page.

Football and basketball want to sell merchandise to kids. Baseball wants to be an example for kids (and sell merchandise).

No, baseball is no different than football or basketball. It’s a better sport, but not morally superior.

Baseball made a serious mistake in the ‘90s by looking the other way while steroid abuse mutated its players, distorted game results and warped its record book.

If pretty much everyone was on steroids, were game results really that drastically altered?

But the Mitchell Report, released a year ago, was a crystal-clear announcement that the sport was banishing its ethical ambiguity on the matter of performance-enhancing drugs. For this purpose, it was irrelevant that the report was incomplete and limited in scope. The Mitchell Report announced that Major League Baseball believed that steroid and HGH use was wrong, unacceptable, and sullied the game.

Nope. I feel like I’ve been repeating myself a lot, but again, the Mitchell Report wasn’t some brave display of purity and wholesomeness, it was sleight of hand, a bone thrown to congressmen who wanted to see themselves on SportsCenter.

It would condemn and embarrass any player found to violate this standard. Cheating was not cool, and cheaters were not welcome. The conduct was officially inconsistent with the values and best interests of the game (as it had, in fact, always been), and the owners, players, teams and fans were hereby expected to heed that fact.

Lenny Dystra didn’t seem too embarrassed, he’s been in the spotlight more in the last year than between his retirement and the Report’s release. And The Dude is still cool.

Whatever else it did or didn’t do, the Mitchell Report accomplished that. Roger Clemens, who had up to that point been extolled as one of the game’s greatest and most admired players, instantly became a tarnished ex-hero because of the Report’s conclusions, aided by the Rocket’s unconvincing declarations of innocence.

Clemens wasn’t tarnished by the Mitchell Report, Brian McNamee took care of that well before I wasted a day in December learning that Paul Lo Duca bounced a check.

For his part, Barry Bonds’ name led all players with 95 mentions in the text. But this only put the exclamation point on what was already a foregone conclusion. The evidence that Bonds was a long-time, intentional, unapologetic and incredibly successful chemical cheat had been mounting for years, and was by then the kind of overwhelming circumstantial and logical mass that could only be denied through obdurate stubbornness and lunk-headedness. Not that there weren’t plenty of stubborn lunk-heads in the media willing to do it: there certainly were…and, incredibly, are. But no one could deny that Bonds was the face of baseball’s steroid disgrace. That gave him special status, or perhaps a better word is infamy.

Yeah, Bonds probably took steroids. Yeah, he’s a dick. But we’re getting away from the most important thing: he’s really, really good. He has the three best OPS+ seasons of all time. Better than any season Babe Ruth, Ted Williams, Willie Mays, Lou Gehrig, Mickey Mantle, Stan Musial, anyone, in any year that baseball was played, ever had.

A team could employ one of the many mediocre, borderline or journeyman players whose names appeared in the Mitchell Report without making the implied statement that it was endorsing and rewarding a cheat. Signing Brendan Donnelly, Paul Lo Duca or Paul Byrd would not be seen as an enlistment in the Dark Side.

And if a team thought that one of those players would help them win games, signing them would be the right thing to do.

Bonds was a different matter entirely, if for no other reason than he had ridden performance enhancement drugs to the pinnacle of baseball’s records. He was the Big Enchilada, the Numero Uno: his career stood for the proposition that steroid use could turn a great player into a super-human juggernaut, shattering all previous limits; that they could allow players to improve dramatically when historically athletes began to decline; that the drugs could lengthen their careers, make the players become more valuable to their teams, and earn them millions more dollars than they would have earned otherwise—and they could get away with it.

Yep, that’s what steroids do; they make players better. Most teams succeed by getting the best players. I’m not saying Barry Bonds isn’t a bad person, in fact I’m pretty sure he eats babies, but he’s really good at baseball. All of that other stuff, the MVP awards, the records, the money, the stupid show on ESPN, is irrelevant.

Bonds was regarded differently because he was different. His success made him different. His arrogant public stance that there was nothing wrong with his conduct made him different. How a team regarded Barry Bonds was unavoidably going to be a statement about steroids, rules, lawbreaking, character and baseball’s values.

Here different is a euphemism for better. Barry Bonds was better than McGwire, better than Sammy Sosa, Palmeiro, Dykstra, Vlad, Kirby Puckett, Derek Jeter, Ken Griffey Jr, all of them. He’s one of the five best players ever. But, like this guy said, he was arrogant. Bud Selig wants to be remembered for the wildcard and interleague play, not steroids. He’s been trying to distract people from steroids, and having Bonds out of the picture helps. That’s why no owners signed Bonds, not because of high-minded ideals.

(Ok, here the guy goes on a whole big spiel about cognitive dissonance. I glanced at it, saw Stephen King and Energy Conservation, and decided to skip over the whole section.)

The team that hired Barry Bonds would be making a devastating statement of its own values and priorities, which would be this: "Cheating and using performance enhancing drugs is not as big a negative on our scale as winning is a positive. So if you help us win enough games, cheating is OK. In fact, it will be rewarded: observe how we hire Barry Bonds despite overwhelming evidence of steroid use and multiple federal indictments."

That “devastating statement of values and priorities” sums up Patriots football pretty accurately. I don’t hear any of their fans complaining; I think they’re too busy rewatching DVDs of the three Superbowls they’ve won this decade. Pretty much anything is forgiven by winning. I don’t get mad when I think about all the double plays Carlos Ruiz hit into; the World Series lifted that monkey off my back.

(There was more psychological nonsense. I’m skipping it again. I’m a philistine. Deal with it.)

Signing Barry Bonds in 2008 would have been as logical as the producers of the Naked Gun series deciding to hire O.J. Simpson to reprise his role as "Norberg" for Naked Gun 4, because, you know, he was sooooo funny in the first three films, and how could you do Naked Gun without bumbling Norberg? It would make as much sense as Disney hiring Lindsay Lohan for a new Herbie movie, because she’s as cute as ever. Pete Rose is a real competitor: let’s hire him to manage the Mariners! He’s just what the team needs to shake it out of its doldrums!

Wow. Barry Bonds didn’t kill anyone. Comparing him to a murderer (never convicted, but come on) is mindblowing. Lohan goes against what Disney stands for, that wholesome family image type thing. Bonds is no more of a dick than a lot of other players, Hall of Famers included. Pete Rose was banned for life. Bonds wasn’t.

Add to this the fact that O.J., Rose and Lohan are definitely better bets to be able to duplicate their previous performances that a 43-year-old, gimpy-kneed Bonds after a half-season of inactivity, and you have a course of action that would not be just foolish, but certifiably insane from a business, baseball, and cultural perspective, short and long term.

So it took until the second to last paragraph for this guy to address signing Bonds as a baseball decision, and the only thing that his analysis shows is that he should have stuck to writing about ethics. Yes, it’s reasonable to expect some decline in his numbers. But in his last season Bonds got on base almost half the time; his OBP was .480. Todd Helton was second, with .434. So even if he declines, he’s still going to be an elite hitter. He would be a liability in the field, but an AL team could sign him to DH, or he could stay in the NL, and even if he costs a few runs with limited range he’ll more than make up for it at the plate.

Thus it should not have come as a surprise to anyone that no team took that course, nor should any team have been accused of negligence or collusion for reaching the only responsible and logical conclusion available. But a lot of sportswriters and sports commentators think values, standards and ethics are irrelevant to baseball.

It’s not a surprise, because, after too many years of Ed Wade being a GM, the depths of stupidity in baseball front offices no longer surprise me. Values, standards, and ethics are irrelevant to baseball. Winning isn’t.

They are so wrong.

You are so wrong.