Bonds launches No. 714, tying Ruth on career HR list

... but when you get to thinking about this, I wonder what is really so different than, say, pitchers of today getting "Tommy John" surgery that enables them to throw harder earlier in career and continue to throw hard after. Are injured players now only relying on ice to relieve pain and swelling? There's all sorts of "things" players do to themselves that are not "natural" when you get down to it.

Considering how much less they had in some ways I'm all the more in awe of the legends. But OTOH, the season and game they played and the equipment they played it with were far different than today.

The legends will remain the legends. Records? They don't erase the feats of past greats.

... I would say "not entirely". We don't really know what prescription drugs the athletes of the past were on. I'm not defending Bonds here so much as I'm pointing out that in pretty much every sport records are good for comparison between contemporaries and not a whole lot more. EVERYTHING is different from most of the ball parks, the bats, the balls, the allowed treatments, career saving and extending surgeries, height of the mound, number of games in the season, distances traveled, etc. etc. etc.

Evie

make up the wildest theory of any performance enhancer that Lou or the Babe used. And of course you can not compare todays players with yesterday, alot about the game has changed. If Sandy Kofax were pitching today off the lower mound, who knows

... does it seem odd to you that certain records/milestones like the Babe's and Maris' lasted SOOOOOO long even when since about the mid 80's baseball players (and indeed all elite athletes) became almost hyperconditioned specimins of physical perfection? (Yes, we still have the occasional David Wells', but most of them, even the bench warmers are in better shape on average than the players of yesteryear). When in so many other sports all of these sort of records have gone by the wayside long ago and are continually surpassed by each new crop of players, why hasn't that happened in baseball so much? It's because the game changed in so many aspects.

I'm just thinking, the "juiced player" of today is probably on a "level playing field" with the players of the Babe's era if you are going to factor everything in. There's no way to know really.

Why don't they test regularly and end all this speculation and uncertainty?

Evie

is that it is hard to hit a round ball with a round bat out of the park. You can't compare today and yesterday, the game and players are completely different. The fact is, Bonds used steroids (as he has admitted under oath).

Comparing today's stats with yesterday's stats is irrelevant to the fact that yesterday's records (as far as we know) were achieved without cheating.

My wife kept a scrapbook of the McGwire/Sosa home run chase in '98. When (a noticeably thinner) McGwire refused to answer the question of whether he was juiced when he did it, and Sosa's numbers mysteriously dropped precipitously as soon as the tougher testing rules went into effect, she threw the scrapbook out.