Game of Shadows

So, I just finished reading Game of Shadows, the expose on the famed BALCO scandal that blew the lid off the use of performance enhancing drugs in sports - particularly in baseball, and also in track and field. As BALCO's marquee baseball client, Barry Bonds was, of course, prominently discussed in the book as well. The litany of stinging revelations about Bonds within the book are, primarily, made it noteworthy, and Bonds shares the cover of the book with fellow juicer Jason Giambi of the Yankees.

I said as I was getting ready to start the book that I did not approve of the methods of the co-authors, who were reporters for the San Francisco Chronicle and broke a number of the key developments in the BALCO story. I definitely still stand by that. A number of the key breaks in the BALCO story came as a result of leaked grand jury testament. I'm not up on the law as it relates to leaking sealed grand jury testimony, so I don't know whether they are technically criminals, but I would assume they could at least be prosecuted as accessories if someone chose to do so. The fact that they've won awards for their journalism on the BALCO case strikes me as rather ironic, given that they were reporting on people who cheated to achieve awards and records. I won't call their work "cheating", but there was definitely some shadiness to their methods. I also came away less than impressed with their journalistic abilities, aside from those methods, because at several times throughout the book, a clear, personal, anti-Bonds attitude came through.

That being said, they definitely had the story nailed. I didn't expect to come away from this book with a lower opinion of Bonds the person, figuring I knew pretty much all the major details. However, I do have to say there were a number of revelations that did leave me with a lesser opinion of him. To be fair, many of the characterizations of him came from his spurned ex-mistress, and, as I said, the authors didn't give a real show of objectivity when it came to Bonds.

I've heard it said on a number of occasions that the fact that Bonds hasn't sued the authors of this book for defamation is tacit proof that their claims are accurate. I've always been a bit hesitant to buy into that argument, especially for active players. I could understand a player not feeling it would be worth dealing with during the context of preparing for and playing a long baseball season. I do believe that Bonds' team did actually try and prevent the book from being released, but on the grounds that it contained leaked testimony, not that anything was untrue. All that being said, if the claims made in this book are not at least substantially true, it's hard for me to believe a guy like Bonds (who has never backed up a step on this whole issue) wouldn't come out swinging at the authors.

One final note - I did not appreciate the authors grandstanding towards the end of the book about how baseball needed to go back and address all the records and accomplishment that had been tainted by steroid use. The book is presented as a journalistic work, a detailed accounting of the facts of the BALCO scandal. And yet here at the end we have an opinion which is ultimately passed off as a fact in the context of the book. My stance on dealing with the past has been made clear, and so I won't go into it again in this space. This was just another item that led me to question the kind of journalists we were dealing with here.

All in all, pretty good read, and more informative than I expected. I have a couple other books dealing with baseball and steroids in my pile, but the next book to come off the non-fiction pile is going to be C.S. Lewis' The Problem of Pain. On the fiction side, I should be wrapping up The Two Towers this week and moving on to the third volume of the Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King.