Letters to the Editor
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Actually
King wrote:
"How would that work? If Bonds didn't hit those home runs, did the pitcher not give them up? What about the runners who scored ahead of him? Did they score? Do the runs count in the games or do we change winners and losers?"
In a word, Yes.
If the league was serious about all this stuff then they should do precisely that...blow the whole damn thing up. Find out when exactly he started taking them (how? I dunno) and go back over ever single solitary game he played in and strike his output from the records...replace it with whatever a Replacement Player (league average) for wherever he batted in the order for that year would've...or just record for all posterity what the game would've turned out to be if he hadn't played (kind of like an asterisk...keep the real result but also show the game results if he was stricken from the game. Let the mess this causes as a reminder of the mess we made of baseball in the 1990s - 2000s.
Of course that would imply that the league wanted to fix this, or that they weren't complicit in this whole affair. Of course they were/are. I hesitate to say Bonds was "used"...but MLB certainly knew what was going on and turned a blind eye - Bonds , McGwire Sosa et al sure did their part towards MLB making $6 bllion in profits last year.
You know, the more I think about this, the more it takes on the appearance of a Greek Tragedy.