Yankees Hall of Fame writers grapple with Barry Bonds

Opinions Cannot Be Wrong

But that’s not how the American people reacted. Even most of his supporters abandoned him, Congress began impeachment proceedings, and Nixon resigned in shame. He remains the only U.S. President to resign the office.

As a reminder, Mr. Bonds once played baseball at a Hall of Fame level. Then, as his skills should have been diminishing, he became a much bigger, stronger hitter. Two reporters, Mark Fainaru-Wada and Lance Williams of the San Francisco Chronicle, felt there might be something wrong.

They not only wrote almost daily columns detailing the exact evidence stongly suggesting that Barry Bonds cheated the game, but also wrote a book about it, Game of Shadows. There was no criminal case, but neither were the reporters sued by Mr. Bonds for their allegations.

Using the civil standard of guilt, rather than the criminal one, my vote from this seat in the court of public opinion is guilty.

Some of you are sneering now and thinking these examples too extreme and not apt. Maybe that’s true.

What is Past is Prologue

I would encourage those of you to take a walk up to the Met. Go inside and turn left, where you’ll find their collection of ancient Greek art; muscular men and lithe ladies.

As you pass them, remember that this is not how the Greeks looked. Instead, they were made as ideals and placed in the rooms of their children, and pregnant mothers.

These statues were not reflections of society, but encouragements in it. The Greeks understood, as others did, that if they wanted to create a better society someday, it needed to start with the messages they send to each other, and the future citizens and decision makers.

As I wrote earlier, I know how easy it can be to get lost in an immoral world. And voting for the Hall of Fame really is a tempest in a teacup, compared to wars and bankruptcies and rigged elections.

But every step in the journey of life leads us to an exact destination. It’s just hard to know which individual steps to take sometimes. Out in the bright world where the lesson is so clearly that liers and cheaters do the best, it can be so easy to feel sorry for the suckers who still cling

to their out-dated values.

Ideas like two wrongs don’t make a right, and a friend and a cliff and what you might do if he plunged unexpectedly seem so old-fashioned. It’s true we live in a world of advanced metrics.