Day 13: 30 baseball books in 30 days of April
The book: "Asterisk: Home Runs, Steroids, and the Rush to Judgement"
The author: David Ezra
How to find it: Triumph Books, $24.95, 226 pages
Where we'd go looking for it: Take it up with the folks at Powell's online bookstore.
The scoop: First, know that Ezra, who works for the lawfirm of Berger Kahn, got his Juris Doctor degree from the USC Law Center, was an editor of the Southern California Law Review, maintains an active law practice in Orange County and, in 2005, began serving as a mediator certified in alternative dispute resolution. He's a baseball fan living in Huntington Beach ...
And he's not convinced Barry Bonds took steroids. At least, not by the evidence that the court of public opinion has been asked to consider. Given to a real judge and/or jury, Ezra seems to believe he could win the argument consider the evidence, as he writes, is "shockingly thin and surprisingly flimsy."
It starts with the book, "Game of Shadows," written by San Francisco Chronicle reporters Mark Fainaru-Wada and Lance Williams, who broke the story that in a federal investigation of BALCO, Bonds and fellow slugger Jason Giambi had admitted to taking steroids. Ezra writes that Fainaru-Wada and Williams "made a venomous and sustained attack against Bonds."
Ezra writes that anyone has convicted Bonds in their own minds "have not yet closely studied the evidence. It isn't their fault. No one is out there compiling evidence to defend Bonds. ... If a fair-minded person looks at that so-called evidence, it is hard to see it as anything but surprisingly weak."
Ezra then goes on to break down those arguments based on how Bonds "looks," how his statistics have increased, how convenient it was that grand jury testimony was leaked, former girlfriend Kimberly Bell's accusations and other "innuendo and speculation by those who dislike him." Ezra also argues in the closing chapter for Bonds' inclusion in the Hall of Fame in his first year of selection.
If Bonds is eventually going to trial for perjury, he might to have Ezra on his legal team.
How it goes down in the scorebook: *
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