King Kaufman's Sports Daily

In a strange moment we'll have to let the ages decipher, Barry Bonds breaks the all-time home run record.

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Aug. 8, 2007 | What a marvelous moment for baseball. What a marvelous moment for the country and the world.

Those were some of the first words out of the mouth of Vin Scully after Henry Aaron broke Babe Ruth's career home run record in 1974. What a marvelous sentiment. Wouldn't it be marvelous to still be able to feel that way about historic achievements in baseball?

Aaron hit that home run 33 years ago. Tuesday night in San Francisco, Barry Bonds broke Aaron's record, driving a pitch from Mike Bacsik of the Washington Nationals over the fence in the deepest part of Your Call Is Very Important to Us Park for career homer No. 756.

The home fans cheered, naturally. Bonds listened to a surprising video message of congratulations from Aaron, who had been keeping his distance from the chase all year, saying at one point that he didn't even know how to spell Bonds' name. Bonds gave a little speech, accepted congratulations from teammates and family.

It almost looked and felt like a regular old celebration of a record being broken. It wasn't, of course. Nothing is that simple with Barry Bonds, except for some of those home fans and the local TV announcers, who steadfastly refuse to mention steroids or controversy. Listening to Giants broadcasts, you'd never know Bonds was anything other than a great player.

Unless you looked closely. Then you'd have noticed no team officials on the field to congratulate Bonds other than Willie Mays, who has a job with the organization but was there as Bonds' godfather. You'd have noticed no one representing Aaron or Ruth's family.

I've been thinking and writing for a while now that Bonds is getting a little bit of a raw deal, that he has become the scapegoat for a whole era of drug abuse and cheating, that to dismiss his achievements as steroid- and human growth hormone-fueled is overly simplistic because we don't know what effect drugs have on baseball performance and we don't know which players and which pitchers were on the juice when.

But that doesn't mean I -- a home fan, after all -- can enjoy this moment any more than most anybody else. I believe Bonds' record is legitimate, that he really did hit all those home runs, that a lot of our reaction as a society to the steroid mess is in-the-moment hysteria -- why aren't we equally upset about amphetamines?

And Bonds' record still feels somehow unreal to me. I've got an asterisk going.

Next page: History will decide how to view Bonds, but history can be a fool