Barry Bonds, the Anti-Ruth December 9, 2004 Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa. The howling mob is right; I was wrong. At the end of the baseball season, more than two months ago, I marveled at Barry Bonds’s preternatural batting statistics. Since then, countless readers have chidden me for ignoring the obvious role steroids have played in enabling Bonds to rewrite the record book from top to bottom. I can only plead that I was trying to give him the benefit of doubt. I should have saved my sympathy for Scott Peterson. I couldn’t believe that “performance-enhancing substances” could...