Posted on 08/08/2007 8:12:46 AM PDT by hardback
This is why he did it. This is, ironically, what he wanted: all eyes on him, urgent cut-ins, the undivided attention of the world. He saw all the love and adoration that was heaped upon Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa nine years ago, and he reacted in typical Barry Bonds fashion.
Like a petty, selfish, spoiled child.
In the end, there is no mystery to this crime story. We know what Bonds did - he admitted it to a grand jury, after placing his hand on the Bible - and we know why he did it. For the most juvenile, sophomoric and stupid of reasons: He was jealous. He had everything, he wanted more.
Bonds was the best all-around player in baseball back then, a certain first-ballot Hall of Famer who already had won six Gold Gloves and three MVPs. And who were they? McGwire and Sosa were good players, sure, but they were never in his class. They cheated their way onto the big stage, so he responded in typical Barry Bonds fashion, like a man without the slightest hint of conscience. He cheated, too.
And he cheated better. He wasn’t going to take a backseat to the white boy, as he called McGwire, according to girlfriend Kimberly Bell.
So he smashed McGwire’s ill-gotten record for homers in a season, and then he set his sights on the most hallowed milestone in sports. Last night in San Francisco he stole that record from the great Hank Aaron with a solo shot off Washington’s Mike Bacsik. In San Francisco, thousands of soulless toadies took great delight in Bonds’ tainted achievement, but beyond the bay, the moment was met with almost universal disgust. Perhaps the only legitimate record set last night was: most eyewitnesses to a crime in human history.
On one level, it is, of course, a sad day in sports. An asterisk is now seared into the baseball record book like a permanent needle mark. Fathers will forever be telling sons about the infamous Steroid Era, a time when the games were not played on the level and the numbers were as phony as a Clinton family photo op. That is too bad.
But you know what would have been much, much worse? Another 1998. Another scam, another sham, another celebration like the one that erupted around McGwire and Sosa, two frauds who mainlined their way into the hearts of American baseball fans. They saved baseball, remember? Sure they did. They saved baseball like Ben Johnson saved the 100 meters, like Rosie Ruiz saved the Boston Marathon.
We’ve probably all been scammed once in our lives. If you were a baseball fan, you got scammed in the summer of ’98, taken for a ride by Sosa and McGwire. Remember it? No one booed back then, but oh, how we wish we had. Oh, how we would like to go back in time and point a finger at these two juiced-up frauds and tell them they weren’t going to get away with it.
Hey, McGwire, you hit .201 before you discovered the joys of performance enhancers. You hit 22 homers in 483 at-bats in 1991. You’re about as much of an all-time great as Dave Kingman was.
And you, Sosa, we caught you corking bats. We know you have no qualms, no conscience about cheating the game. You expect us to believe you just kind of filled in?
Liars, cheaters, frauds, phonies. Together they spit on Maris and Mantle and Mays, and all the other 180-pound stars who did it for real. They chose the shortcut, better hitting through chemistry, and thought they were going to get away with it. They had the union zealots behind them, they had a linguini-spined commissioner and they had the starry-eyed sycophants from ESPN who wanted to believe that flaxseed could make a man’s head grow a size and a half. Oh, but along came tenacious federal agent Jeff Novitzky, the BALCO grand jury and“Game of Shadows,” the brilliant expose that split sports fans into two camps: You either flat-out know that Bonds is a lying, cheating, chemically enhanced creep, or you didn’t read the book.
It’s all there in this devastating, 300-page disinfectant. You digest the facts laid out by Lance Williams and Mark Fainaru-Wada, and you understand that what we saw last night would not have happened if Bonds hadn’t broken federal laws and, thus, violated the rules of Major League Baseball.
It is too bad he got this far, but in the end, there is great consolation in the reaction of the public. He might have gotten to 756, but does it feel like he got away with it? There is no one left who genuinely, honestly believes in his heart that Bonds did not cheat. There is no one who believes Bonds would have been rounding the bases last night, two weeks after his 43rd birthday, if he hadn’t taken a detour through the BALCO labs.
We got fooled once, in ’98, and the joke was on us. We got fooled twice, last night in San Francisco, and the joke was on Bonds. He stole Aaron’s record, but he did not get away with it. Hundreds of millions of people watched this historic moment, all of them eyewitnesses to a crime.
However, the juice added 50 feet to his drives changing them from flyball outs to 400 foot homeruns. That's the fallacy in your argument. Take away the juice and he hits 600 homeruns lifetime. Give him the asterisk!
thought that was the NBA?
The punchline is it doesn’t matter. The PA and Selig made sure that steroids weren’t against the rules for most of Bonds’ Sosa’s and McGuire’s careers. They wanted to bring the crowds back, they wanted some excitement, and for their sins the record book has been rewritten.
And why doesn’t everybody obsess on the sluggers. There are indications pitchers were juicing too. And that probably helped the record, faster balls travel farther when hit.
“He deserves the accolades for this achievement.”
I strongly disagree that Bonds* deserves accolades. Frankly, this whole thing makes me NOT want to watch baseball or especially go to a game.
If the record for which he's being celebrated had nothing to do with how far the ball flew, I would be more inclined to agree with you; however, the reality is tha without the juice many of the balls he so skillfilly hit would have been caught in the outfield.
When is the grand jury going to indict or the prosecution to begin?!!!???
I read an interestind article by Rick Reilly about Barry Bonds...this was 10 years or more ago. He said that there's the team, and then there's Bonds. The team travels by bus, Bonds charters a limo for himself. The team eats food that's catered, Bonds has his own personal nutritionist and chef. And so on.
Bonds is an embarrassment, IMHO. I'd not seen anything on the TV about his record last night, so I perused SI online. Man, talk able a lukewarm bunch of articles... Here's the one record in Baseball that everyone knows, and SI is running with headlines like "B*nds". I think that just about says it all.
Baseball can say Barry Bonds hit 756 homers, but they can’t make me care.
I think the grand jury asked for another 6 months to review the evidence last week.
Barry was a guy that swung at strikes and let everything else go by. His command of the strike zone is amazing. That said, his juicing prolonged his career well past the point that he would have declined.
It's a fricken GAME. Last I heard, they don't hand out Peace Prizes for the most yardage run in a single season nor for runs batted in.
except a trial hasn’t been completed in this case
Oh, I used to care. No more.
That's why I'm happy for his accomplishment. I like to be different from the mainstream.
Period.
A lot of people haven’t really looked at the numbers. If they did, they would discover some interesting facts:
— Bonds has averaged only 2 more HRs a season than Hank Aaron
— HA hit many dingers a year over his average after turning 35 (like Bonds); In the 5 years after turning 35, HA hit 44, 38, 47, 34, and 40 HRs while he averaged only 32 a year. Those, like for Bonds, were the most productive 5 years of HA’s career
— while HA did hit more HRs than Bonds early in his career, Bonds started to reverse the trend at age 30; if he was on steroids at that age, they didn’t do his HR production much good, as from age 30-35, Bonds barely hit more HRs than his average, and only had two (low) 40+ seasons.
— the monster year of 73 HRs is what skews the average difference between the two; if you take that year out, both HA and BB have the same per year average HRs.
— Bonds became a better HR hitter when he started playing for the Giants.
Whether Bonds is on steroids or not, I don’t see it as making a big difference in HR production. Unless, of course, Aaron was on steroids too. The thing is, if you can play for 20 years and hit 30 HRs a year (which isn’t going to raise a red flag for steroids), you’ve got 600 for a career. 600 has always been considered a very high achievement, but I’m betting there are a few guys (including ARod) in the game today that can do that or come close. My point is if you can play 22 years and hit a decent number of HRs, you can get into the elite. What Bonds has done, given his time in the game, shouldn’t blow one’s mind.
Steroids have little to do with Bond’s record.
How conveeeeenient.
Now that you menton it, I’ve always wondered about Clemens.
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