Most sports fans do not really understand steroids. Do you swallow 'em or shoot 'em? Rub 'em on or drink 'em with branch water? Smoke 'em or snort 'em?

Do they kill you or kill your opponents? Or both?

For that matter, what color are they? Green, maybe? Red? Blue? What?

How much do they cost? Where do you buy them?

And finally, do they even work?

Show me one sports fan who can correctly answer those questions, and I'll show you a chemist.

This I do know: Talk steroids long enough to hard-core sports fans, and their eyelids gradually will droop. Shortly thereafter, they'll begin to nod, then doze, then snore, then awake at 3 a.m. for a potty call.

But as much as fans do not understand steroids, they do understand statistics. And nowhere are statistics more important than in baseball. Which, of course, brings us to Barry Bonds, Mark McGwire, Sammy Sosa, Jason Giambi and almost every other player who suddenly started smacking home runs when he was swinging for singles.

The long ball has become the slam dunk of baseball. What once was reasonably rare has become commonplace. Second basemen hit 'em out to dead-center, often twice a game.

Maybe the hitters are just better. Maybe the pitchers are just awful.

Or maybe it's steroids.

The thing I cannot understand is the lack of outrage.

It was my good fortune in the 1970s to get to know Roger Maris as a casual friend. He often visited Raleigh to promote the sales of beer as a Budweiser distributor. I played golf with him a few times, interviewed him, wrote about his then-completed career and often heard tales of his miserable 1961 season -- the year he hit 61 home runs and was hated by fans in New York and elsewhere.

Maris was not a big man -- 6 feet, maybe 180 pounds. He had a muscular upper body, but, like a lot of athletes of his time, fairly weak knees. He was as modest as a sunset on a cloudy afternoon. Never did he fail to point out that he had been maybe the third- or fourth-best hitter on a team that won 109 games in '61. Maris could talk endlessly about Mickey Mantle's talent, or Whitey Ford's, or Ellie Howard's.

Yet, Roger Maris was perhaps the most persecuted athlete ever in 1961. I'm not overlooking Jack Johnson when I say that, or Jackie Robinson, or Muhammad Ali or Hank Aaron.

Johnson, Robinson, Ali and Aaron were treated by racists with a hatred that must have been impossibly intense. But at least those men had the support of a valiant few.

Maris was hated by a nation.

"I wish I had never broken that record," he once said of Babe Ruth's 60 homers in a single season. "I wish I had gotten to 59 and just stopped right there."

Technically, baseball's front office didn't acknowledge Maris' accomplishment. It was ordered that his 61 homers be accompanied by an asterisk -- a reminder that Maris had played 162 games and Ruth 154.

But before he died in 1985 at age 51, Maris predicted that his record would fall and be widely celebrated.

"Times have changed," he said. "Attitudes have changed. Fans will like you for what you've done, rather than who you passed."

That's where we are. For all any of us really know today, the steroids of the 2000s are what painkillers were in the 1950s. Twenty years from now, steroids may be seen only as the next generation of vitamins. People today have artificial hearts. In 20 years, people may just as easily have bionic arms capable of throwing 150 mph fastballs.

Before he's done, Bonds likely will have hit 800 home runs. Someday there will be a player with 900. Two decades from now, Aaron's 755 may be no more than a number down the list.

Maybe we should look at baseball statistics in terms of a player's size compared to his output. On his biggest day as a position player, Aaron was about 6 feet, 170. But if you ever saw him hit a homer -- the snake-like flick of those wrists, the drive of that lower body, his quick glance at the left-center wall -- you never forgot it.

Barry Bonds should be so lucky.

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