Barry Bonds and Baseball For Beginners

The question, posed in a thread called SPORTS on, of all places, the Beach Boys chat board I frequent, and posed by John K., from the Netherlands, a professed snooker aficionado, was simple enough:

What do you baseball fans think of Barry Bonds, who seems to have equalled some record? It appears that a whole bunch of people hate him. Why would they do that?
Anyone care to expand?

If ever I had an opportunity to write the antithesis of a "Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus" letter, it was in response to this post.

I wrote the following in reply:

Keep in mind that Mark (one of the board's moderators), God love him, is a fan of the team that Barry plays for. I don't hold it against him any more than I hold it against Yankees fans for being the misguided souls that THEY are.

What ~ I ~ think of Barry Bonds is that he's a tragic figure. He was one of the game's best pure hitters early in his career. A great player in his early years with Pittsburgh and his first few years in San Francisco; by all accounts, a lock for the baseball Hall of Fame. Had he continued to play the game the way he had in the first ten years of his career, that would have been enough by any standard. He was great, unstoppable. I always had the utmost respect for him as a competitor. I never "hated" him; always feared him. He was a dangerous player, multifaceted, with great skills, natural speed, a great hitter... the "whole package," as a scout would probably say.

However...

Unfortunately, by all accounts and testimony, Bonds was "turned to the dark side" at around age 34, and started using performance enhancing drugs and supplements, reportedly out of extreme jealousy over all the attention that was beng lavished on some of the power hitters (Sammy Sosa, Mark McGwire) in the game. He undertook a regimen of steroid use expressly designed by those who supplied him with the drugs to "fly under the radar" of the random drug tests implemented by the sport. He testified that he "never knowingly" used steroids. People who are convinced that he DID use them (me among them) point to the radical change in his body and inexplicable spike in his stats (his performance improved at an age where his peers were almost all declining).

They also point to a book called GAME OF SHADOWS, which sadly lays out, count by count, a pretty scary, sad, sickening case against Bonds, most of it from grand jury testimony, none of it circumstantial or hearsay.

He's also pretty much of a jerk to the press and, worse, to the fans, the people to whom he is most beholden for paying his salary.

He seems to me to be the antithesis of what Cal Ripken spoke of in his Hall induction speech when he said:

...When I realized that I could use baseball to help make life better especially for the kids, baseball became a platform. By trying to set a good example, I could help influence young people in positive and productive ways. And some of this became apparent to me in my earliest playing days. So as my major league career unfolded, I started playing a little more attention to my actions. I remember when Kenny Singleton showed me a tape of me throwing my helmet down after a strikeout and all he said was, "How does that look?" I remember learning about a family who saved their money to come to Baltimore to see me play. I got thrown out in the first inning and their little boy cried the whole game. I remember how I reacted with anger when dad was fired after an oh and six start, and after each of those events and others, I vowed to act better the next time.

As the years passed, it became clear to me that kids see it all, and it's not just some of your actions that influence; it's all of them. Whether we like it or not as big leaguers, we are role models. The only question is will we be positive or will it be negative.

Should we put players up on a pedestal and require them to take responsibility? No. But we should encourage them to use their influence positively, to help build up and develop the young people who follow the game...

More than that, though, Bonds, to me, is symbolic of the sad state of professional sports in the USA right now. There are a lot of people who defend Bonds, and on this point, I agree with them: if he indeed took steroids or other performance enhancing drugs to amp up his records, he did so in an environment where baseball, if it didn't ENCOURAGE such behavior, certainly looked the other way while it happened. The gate receipts from record breaking home runs were what turned the owners and the game's "commissioner" to "the dark side." They ALL ought to be ashamed of themselves.

As one of my favorite baseball writers, the Baltimore SUN columnist Peter Schmuck, said in a recent column, "Sports fans want their games back. They want to talk about statistics, not steroids. They want to be able to turn on SportsCenter and not have to explain to a 10-year-old what it means to 'make it rain' at a strip club. They wish baseball didn't need a Mitchell investigation and football didn't need a Goodell doctrine."

Bonds, fairly or unfairly, right or wrong, guilty or innocent, has become the poster boy for this frustration. That he has been under this cloud of suspicion while striving to break the most hallowed record in baseball (Hank Aaron's career home run record) probably exacerbates it.

Still, as far as I can see, he and the powers that run baseball (the owners, the Players' Union, and the "Commissioner" of the game) brought it all on themselves. They deserve each other.

Got it, Netherlands?