Barry Bonds is Here to Stay

And now, back to our scheduled programming. Right?
Now that Barry Bonds has finally surpassed Hank Aaron with his 756th career home run, we can all go back to enjoying pitcher vs. hitter match-ups and following the chase for pennants in both leagues, can't we? Probably not.
At least we won't have to endure sports columnists and radio personalities talking about an aging slugger on a last place team. Wrong again.
The reason Barry Bonds' chase, and now eclipse, of Hank Aaron got stuck in the craws of baseball fans everywhere over the past 5 years is the same reason people will continue to talk about Bonds for a long time. He broke the most sacred record in a sport that holds numbers and records more sacred than any sport. And he did it all under the heavy suspicion of steroid use.
Bonds has never been a likable character, but make no mistake about it, the reason so many fans will be loathe to ever regard Bonds as the Home Run King is because he cheated, not because he's a bad guy or a bad teammate. He broke the record fans hold nearest and dearest to their hearts, and he most likely did it on steroids.
Baseball has always been a sport that uses numbers to compare generations and players in different leagues. Sure, we can all put an asterisk in our heads when thinking about the numbers of other players in the steroid era, but none of them will ever reach 755. Relativism only gets you so far; it stops at the top of the record book. Sure, you can say Sammy Sosa probably cheated, but he hasn't forever marred the record books. Bonds has, and that can never be changed.
Records are meant to be broken; that's why people get so excited by the pursuit of them, whether it be a player on a 30-game hitting streak chasing Joe DiMaggio or a pitcher with 17 strikeouts entering the ninth inning. But people want to see those records broken by people who do not have dark cloud lingering over them, whether there is a legal conviction of wrong doing or not. With Bonds' passing of Aaron, people feel cheated; they feel betrayed; they feel the integrity of the game has been destroyed by someone who compromised his ethics for personal glory. And that betrayal spawns indignation that will be around as long as the record book is.