The Eclectic

I was watching SportsCenter and got to watch 756

fly over the right center field wall live.

Given the whole mess about Bonds, I wanted to take a beat to talk about what this means for the game.

First, Steroids do not help you hit the ball. What they do is help your body recover so that you can be in the batter’s box with muscles that are less sore.

Pop Fisher: People don’t start playing ball at your age, they retire!

That’s the crux of the problem for Bonds. The ‘roids didn’t cause him to hit those home runs but they put him in a position to have a chance to hit them as his body aged and took longer to heal as he past age 34. (34 is an important baseball age because of “The Natural”)

At a time when Bonds’ number should have been dropping, they were going up. That hasn’t happened before.

But the urge to hit the ball the older you get isn’t just an MLB thing.

Where I play softball, there are guys who drop $300 a season for a Miken bat.

Think the bat doesn’t matter? Well here is a story from my batboy days.

The Men of Steele (Steele softball bats) came to Cooper Stadium for a pregame home run contest. Best softball power hitters in 1989 played for Steele. One 1 ball got close to going out of the park.

The Easton Long Haul Bombers are hitting over 10 balls out per man on average. One of them even hit one out of the new yard in Cincinnati last year.

Oh, and Berry uses a maple bat that is harder than the white ash Hank used.

In the end, it doesn’t really matter. Baseball will not be hurt by this. Chicks dig the long ball as the ad goes.

In a way, I wonder if Bonds will go after Sadaharu Oh’s mark of 868?