The Consequences

With Bonds needing only seven home runs to pass Babe Ruth and the four dozen to end Aaron's 32-year reign as the Home Run King, Game of Shadows arrives just in time. It spares us the indignity of investing wholly into what, cleanly obtained, could have been the sporting celebration of a lifetime. Instead it challenges us to reflect not on the greatness of Bonds but on his unworthiness. There is unease in that reality, a discomfort in knowing, as Robert Browning wrote timelessly:

The lie was dead

And damned, and truth stood up instead.

For this is baseball, an institution knocked low when truth no longer resides in its numbers.