3.07.2006
Everybody Breathe Regular....
Okay, so the full naked exposure of Barry Bonds has finally happened. Welcome, 2006 season, here's your dominating lead story before we even can get started. Great. Since everyone will now be forced to discuss steroids all year long -- again -- and since we can see no feasible way around it, we have a smattering of thoughts and predictions for the fallout:
-It bears repeating: baseball in 2006 just got a lot less fun thanks to this 8.7 earthquake of a story. It's an inevitability anytime politicians decide to involve themselves, and you can cue the self-righteous invective from John McCain in 5, 4, 3....
-This is sort of a tragedy in the ancient Greek sense, because the same thing that helped infuse Bonds with such greatness proved to be his undoing. But even sadder for baseball fans is the fact that Bonds was already a Hall of Famer before 1998, when his jealousy of Mark McGwire reportedly drove him to start using. Nobody will remember this. He was already the hitter I least wanted to see coming up in a tight situation against my team, the toughest out in the game, tougher than Ken Griffey Jr., Tony Gwynn, Albert Belle, or anyone else. But jealousy and ambition wouldn't let him be content with that. Tragedy.
-On the bright side, it's about time that Pedro Gomez started to reap dividends from his relentless shadowing of Bonds over the past--oh wait, you mean he didn't even get this story? It was a pair of SF Chronicle reporters instead? Oh.
-The most sickening aspect for me so far? That amidst all the bravery of this grand expose, Chronicle reporters Mark Fainaru-Wada and Lance Williams are either unable or unwilling to name any of the other seven NFLers and four MLBers implicated in this scandal by their apparent involvement with Greg Anderson, Victor Conte et al. Why not? What honor are we trying to protect here? Whose agents have had to go how far under the table to prevent the naming of their clients? I'm getting nauseous just thinking about it.
-Hopefully the Giants do not escape their share of blame here. Their complicity in this whole saga, up to and including their spin of Bonds as a gentler, rehabilitated personality in the midst of his home run chase, is as damning as if Peter Magowan had just injected Bonds himself. Already their 2006 season looks doomed -- not that Randy Winn and Matt Morris were going to lead them to glory anyway -- and we can expect ticket sales to take a nice precipitous drop. Everyone knew that the post-Bonds Giants were going to be a disaster area; that process may have started ahead of schedule.
-It looks like Hank Aaron will now be safe at 755 HR, which is another nice unintended consequence. Too bad though, because allowing The Cheater to set the new record would eventually set the table for Alex Rodriguez to come riding in on his white horse (a horse of no particular national affiliation). If anyone was asking the question of what it would take for A-Rod to revive his limpid image, this would have done the trick, albeit a decade later than he and Scott Boras might like.
-Bonds may be stricken from the record books -- although I'm not sure it should happen -- but nobody will ever be able to take away the TV ratings, ticket sales, World Series appearances (where Bonds' OBP was only .700), or that ungodly May 2001 series against Atlanta, when Bonds homered six times in three games. Nobody will be able to take away the feeling of seeing Bonds come to the plate and knowing, in a sport where a 60% failure rate is wildly successful, knowing that Bonds was either going to launch a homer or be walked. It was exhilirating to see, and at the same time the natural order of baseball was thrown completely out of whack. The commentariat began floating proposals for altering intentional walk rules to allow baserunners to automatically advance a base. We got to see the very fabric of the game being altered in such a way that it *had* to be unnatural. Not the sort of thing we're likely to see ever again in our lifetimes.
-Until the next cheater, that is. And there will be one, if there isn't one already, if not several dozen. Human growth hormone is still practically undetectable, as are at least ten to twelve designer drugs that you and I don't even know about yet. Try not to think about it. Hey, how about that World Baseball Classic? U-S-A! U-S-A!
-It bears repeating: baseball in 2006 just got a lot less fun thanks to this 8.7 earthquake of a story. It's an inevitability anytime politicians decide to involve themselves, and you can cue the self-righteous invective from John McCain in 5, 4, 3....
-This is sort of a tragedy in the ancient Greek sense, because the same thing that helped infuse Bonds with such greatness proved to be his undoing. But even sadder for baseball fans is the fact that Bonds was already a Hall of Famer before 1998, when his jealousy of Mark McGwire reportedly drove him to start using. Nobody will remember this. He was already the hitter I least wanted to see coming up in a tight situation against my team, the toughest out in the game, tougher than Ken Griffey Jr., Tony Gwynn, Albert Belle, or anyone else. But jealousy and ambition wouldn't let him be content with that. Tragedy.
-On the bright side, it's about time that Pedro Gomez started to reap dividends from his relentless shadowing of Bonds over the past--oh wait, you mean he didn't even get this story? It was a pair of SF Chronicle reporters instead? Oh.
-The most sickening aspect for me so far? That amidst all the bravery of this grand expose, Chronicle reporters Mark Fainaru-Wada and Lance Williams are either unable or unwilling to name any of the other seven NFLers and four MLBers implicated in this scandal by their apparent involvement with Greg Anderson, Victor Conte et al. Why not? What honor are we trying to protect here? Whose agents have had to go how far under the table to prevent the naming of their clients? I'm getting nauseous just thinking about it.
-Hopefully the Giants do not escape their share of blame here. Their complicity in this whole saga, up to and including their spin of Bonds as a gentler, rehabilitated personality in the midst of his home run chase, is as damning as if Peter Magowan had just injected Bonds himself. Already their 2006 season looks doomed -- not that Randy Winn and Matt Morris were going to lead them to glory anyway -- and we can expect ticket sales to take a nice precipitous drop. Everyone knew that the post-Bonds Giants were going to be a disaster area; that process may have started ahead of schedule.
-It looks like Hank Aaron will now be safe at 755 HR, which is another nice unintended consequence. Too bad though, because allowing The Cheater to set the new record would eventually set the table for Alex Rodriguez to come riding in on his white horse (a horse of no particular national affiliation). If anyone was asking the question of what it would take for A-Rod to revive his limpid image, this would have done the trick, albeit a decade later than he and Scott Boras might like.
-Bonds may be stricken from the record books -- although I'm not sure it should happen -- but nobody will ever be able to take away the TV ratings, ticket sales, World Series appearances (where Bonds' OBP was only .700), or that ungodly May 2001 series against Atlanta, when Bonds homered six times in three games. Nobody will be able to take away the feeling of seeing Bonds come to the plate and knowing, in a sport where a 60% failure rate is wildly successful, knowing that Bonds was either going to launch a homer or be walked. It was exhilirating to see, and at the same time the natural order of baseball was thrown completely out of whack. The commentariat began floating proposals for altering intentional walk rules to allow baserunners to automatically advance a base. We got to see the very fabric of the game being altered in such a way that it *had* to be unnatural. Not the sort of thing we're likely to see ever again in our lifetimes.
-Until the next cheater, that is. And there will be one, if there isn't one already, if not several dozen. Human growth hormone is still practically undetectable, as are at least ten to twelve designer drugs that you and I don't even know about yet. Try not to think about it. Hey, how about that World Baseball Classic? U-S-A! U-S-A!
