Panama Red said:
Did all of those balls go over the fence? Or were the runs and stats taken away?
Steroids was part of baseball long, long before Bonds and McGwire saved the game in 1998. Yes, they cheated, but it is a part of the history of the game.
1998 was McGwire and Sosa. Bonds only hit 37 that year, batting .303, slugging .609, numbers completely in line with his career up til that point.
Bonds' numbers started climbing a bit outside the normal range for his career in 2000 - 49 HR (previous high 46) and .688 slg (prior best .677) then skyrocketed in 2001, the year he hit 73 HR, 1.327 slg.
(And FWIW, I was in the left field bleachers the last game of the season, when he hit #73. That game was originally scheduled for Sept. 16, but had been rescheduled due to 9/11.)
From what I've read after the fact, Bonds apparently reasoned at some point after 1998 that HRs were getting all the attention, and that the powers that be (i.e., Selig) were turning a blind eye to PED use, then he would play that game, too. I remember that he said something at one of the trials (Balco, IIRC), along the lines of Maximus in
Gladiator, "Were you not entertained?"
The bottom line is we'll never know for sure all of the players who used PEDs before MLB finally got embarassed and pulled the plug on it. And while the public concentrates on players like Bonds, Clemens, McGwire, Sosa, ARod, et al, there were doubtless scores of borderline players who used PEDs to provide the edge that made the difference between making a big league roster and topping out at AAA.
******
On a different tack, as a lifelong Giants fan, while I think Matt Cain was a excellent and extremely reliable pitcher, I don't think he's a HoFer. That's even with his perfect game in 2012 and his amazing post-season in 2010 (21.1 IP, 0.00 ERA). His career stats are misleading, as he suffered from several years playing on bad teams, and he was also one of those pitchers who never seemed to get a lot of run support (losing a game 2-1 or 1-0 was termed "getting Cained"), but there were several years where he wasn't even the best pitcher on his own team, being number two behind first Lincecum and then Bumgarner.