Bonds and Babe

Not being a huge baseball fan, I don't consider myself qualified to pass judgment on Barry Bonds as he surpasses the Babe in career home runs. But as a sports fan in general, I can say this: Bonds probably didn't do anything that hundreds of other athletes did, and, no, that doesn't make it okay. Performance-enhancing drugs cheapen the game.

If baseball, and all other sports leagues, wanted to get serious about stopping abuse of illegal substances, one very simple solution occurs to me. Make a very clear list of what is banned, then institute a rule that anyone caught using them more than once will have all his official statistics cleared from the official records and that athlete will be banned from consideration for his sports' hall of fame. One thing that matters to athletes, particularly professional athletes, is their stats and the hall of fame.