It's statistics, not steroids, that we really care about

Are more people upset about Barry Bonds' alleged steroid use, or that he broke Hank Aaron's hallowed home run record? Mike Zarrilli/Getty Images Sport

When Bill Clinton first ran for president in 1992, his campaign posted the now-famous slogan "It's the economy, stupid!" in its headquarters to keep the candidate and everyone around him on point about what the electorate truly cared about. And it worked.

To paraphrase that slogan now, It's the stats, not the steroids, stupid! (No insult intended.)

When it comes to the steroids debate, what do we the people care about most, and why? Sure, some people object to them because they are illegal, genuinely banned substances in violation of laws that easily trump the rules of any league or the provisions of any collective bargaining agreement.

Some consider their use to be "cheating," a breach of sportsmanship that, by definition, ought to be upheld in each of these pursuits.

Others fret about the kids, the impressionable youth who might be swayed into making unhealthy, even deadly, choices for their own bodies just to make a varsity squad or look good at the beach.

Still others recoil from the image of already strong athletes, pants around their ankles, clandestinely stabbing each other with syringes in a bathroom stall.

Then there are the folks who who consider steroids and PEDs to be a personal choice, possibly a fool's game but not really anyone else's business. If an athlete wants to pump iron, practice yoga, cross-train, seek acupuncture, gobble megavitamins, swallow raw eggs, pop amphetamines, drink muscle-building protein shakes, pray to Buddha, howl at the moon, dance with wolves, sleep with the fishes or smear on a little of the ol' clear and the cream, why should any of us care? Make all the choices available to all the participants and, hey, let the games begin.

In practice, though, steroid use bothers most of us only in proportion to what the so-called cheater is getting away with. Knowingly or not, we have a hierarchy of outrage over this stuff. It is ordered according to what we perceive to be at risk. And more often than not, it's how we feel about the stats, not the people or the product, that drives our level of outrage.

It goes something like this:

• At the top of the hierarchy, sports fans are disgusted with and resentful of Giants slugger Barry Bonds, because, in this chemical den of thieves, he has stolen biggest and most brazenly. By chasing down Willie Mays, Babe Ruth and Henry Aaron to become the all-time home run king, Bonds has cheated in broad daylight, targeting the most cherished record in team sports the way Auric Goldfinger grabbed for Fort Knox. That he knocked off the single-season HR mark on his way and elbowed onto all the slugging lists heightens his lack of shame.

• People are cynical about Roger Clemens, angrily discarding him in the wake of the Mitchell Report the same way Clemens handled the fat end of Mike Piazza's broken bat in Game 2 of the 2000 World Series. Clemens has maintained his cleanliness, while failing the simple tests of common baseball sense and eyeball wisdom. As the pitching equivalent of Bonds, Clemens' statistics went up at an age when -- in his and everyone else's careers -- they should have gone down. But because his assault on statistics has been more vague -- he hasn't edged close to Cy Young's 511 victories or Nolan Ryan's 5,714 strikeouts -- proportionally, so has our outrage.

• Baseball fans are disappointed, maybe even scornful, of Mark McGwire, who inspired awe and joy in 1998 when he and Sammy Sosa stalked Roger Maris' record of 61 home runs in a season. The big redhead's improbable physique -- body by DC Comics -- and shattering of Maris' mark (by 15 percent) was balanced, at the time, by Sosa's accompaniment and, as often has been said, baseball's and the fans' complicity in wanting to see it all happen. But if you really think about him now -- no longer the single-season leader, never a threat to Ruth's or Aaron's totals, seemingly not on track for the Hall of Fame and far out of the public eye -- McGwire inspires little wrath. As I noted last week, he probably has some real wiggle room these days to rehab his image, at least in part because his stats aren't front and center anymore.

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