Rick Ankiel: The Feelgood story that went bad?

Barry Bonds has to be one of the most disliked figures in baseball if not all sports. Short of the fragile overpaid, overhyped David Beckham few people in American sports get more negative press. The cloud that hangs over Bonds after his succesful pursuit of Hank Aaron's home run record is due to the questions of was his pursuit fueled by illegal performance enhancing drugs. Now comes the curious case of one Rick Ankiel. I'll give you the condensed version of his story. Ankiel came on the scene in 2000, a whiz kid pitcher who had 11 wins and a solid 194 strikeouts for the Cards. He could even swing the bat a fair piece with a pair of home runs to his credit that year. One would think that a promising career beckoned That is why his meltdown in the playoffs was stuff of legend. Not only could he not throw strikes, he couldn't throw to the catcher. It was mindboggling and a bit sad. One could have chalked it up to stage fright, Steve Blass disease or yips. He could not find the plate and had five wild pitches...in one inning! Ankiel didn't pitch again that postseason and a couple attempts in subsequent seasons both died out quickly, baseball scribes and fans both shrugged it off as a case of a kid with potential gone bust.
Ankiel however remade himself, always handy with the bat he worked at being an everyday player and worked his way back through the Cardinals system as an outfielder. Always the humble sort, he earned his promotion back to the major leagues and proved that he was the real deal: His .353 batting average, 9 home runs and sparkling defense in the field opened a lot of eyes and have rallied the defending World Series Champs back into contention for the NL Central pennant.
All of which makes the allegations that Ankiel took performance enhancing drugs (HGH to be specific), all that much troubling, but ah there's a catch: Ankiel allegedly took these drugs in 2004, before they were put on the banned substances list by MLB and while he was still recovering from Tommy John surgery. He had a prescription The media has pounced on this story and whined that their feelgood story has been ruined and have cynically offered Ankiel up as another reason we should feel like them about sports in general, cynical and jaded. Writers like Jayson Stark are a notable exception. Read Stark's column http://sports.espn.go.com/mlb/columns/story?columnist=stark_jayson&id=3009424&lpos=spotlight&lid=tab1pos1 and you'll agree with him and your humble scribe here that there is a double standard, and how we are so quick to try to explain away what he did, if he did it. Counter this with the vitirol that is spewed at Bonds despite the lack of any positive test for a banned substance or documentation beyond allegation in the press and books by players like the disgraced Jose Canseco continues to be adjudged a cheater and how his marks should be stricken from the record, given an asterisk or placed in some sort of exception category for the era. I think Barry Bonds is one of the greatest players to play the game, but make no mistake I'm not an apologist for him by any stretch. But he, like Rick Ankiel should be given the benefit of the doubt until it is concretely proven that he did something wrong. There should be no double standard on that.