Bomani Jones :

...the culprit in this steroids stuff is baseball. Bonds may have cheated according to commonly held notions of fairness, but he wasn't breaking baseball rules by using steroids before 2004. They weren't illegal at the time. So there's really no knock there on Bonds.

It's not his fault that the players' union never allowed 'roid testing.

And in the case of segregation, the culprit was baseball. Segregation was cheating according to commonly held notions of fairness, but it was the law of the land of baseball. Judge Landis and the boys kept the momentum going on the color barrier.

It's not Ruth's fault that blacks weren't allowed to play.

...If you believe Jeff Pearlman's Love Me, Hate Me--which is only my shelf but still unread by me--then you believe that Bonds started using steroids because McGwire and Sosa passed him using drugs and it killed Bonds inside to see that. So while he's painted as the villain of this era of steroids, he could just as equally be painted as the reason why steroid testing was so necessary.