The Futility Infielder

I've been thinking about Barry Bonds lately, more specifically about the way I respond to Barry Bonds. Perhaps its a story emblematic of our times, or maybe just a sad commentary on my own capability for detatchment, but it took the recent death of his father for Barry Bonds to finally break through to me.

I've been no huge fan of the late-model Barry Bonds. I ceased wonder somewhere around the end of the 2001 season, my jaw agape from staring at too many Baseball Tonight reruns, my eyes aglaze from sifting through endless numbers crunched in demonstration of his prowess, proclamining his elevation to the pantheon. I've grown blasé about his continued success. Another jack out of the park? You don't say. On the only pitch he got to swing at the entire game? Yawn. Hitting .370 with 198 walks? Hmmmph. Comparisons to Hank Aaron, Babe Ruth, and Willie Mays, the only men whose milestone home run totals now lay ahead of him? What else ya got?

I was the same way about Michael Jordan. Though I enjoyed his ascendance -- the Slam Dunk contest victories, the Spike Lee commercials, that first title run in which he laid waste to both the Pistons and the Lakers -- by the time of Jordan's second retirement I loathed the man. Sure, it had much to do with the fact that he'd beaten my Utah Jazz for the NBA championship two years in a row, capping it off with a shot that assumed mythical status. But my awe for him was long gone. Through that second threepeat, I was flat bored by his greatness, by the inevitablity of his team's victories, by the barrage of highlight films and by the slickness of his public persona. Not even the sight of Jordan wearing a strange uniform, failing to impose his will on a lackluster collection of playground yahoos as his own body broke down won him any sympathy in my book.

Bonds' performance in the face of his father's losing battle with cancer has changed my thinking on the man. It's not just the fireworks he's produced -- the game-winning homer upon returning to the team after a weekend spent visiting his ailing father, the home run in his first game back following his father's death (in a game he later left because of an accelerated heartbeat), the game-winning hit two nights later after being released from the hospital following treatment for exhaustion. It's that he's doing all of this with a heavy heart, able to shut out his grief only long enough to step into the one place he's in control, the batter's box, and perform at a level that may be unparalleled.

Dan Le Batard's article in the September 15 ESPN magazine offers a rare glimpse of a man who has gone to great lengths to protect himself from such intimacy. Penetrating the bubble which has surrounded the superstar for years, Le Batard captures the rawness of Bonds' emotions, the turmoil of his ordeal, and finds a man at the point of breaking down:

"I'm done," Bonds says. "The young players, it's their turn. I had my fun, and I keep screwing up and coming back. What for? Why bother? I can't do this anymore. I've already told the guys: a few more games, and I'm gone. I'm day-to-day, man. None of those records mean anything to me. My godfather and my father are the only reason I played, for their approval. I admired the rest of them -- Hank, Babe, Ted -- but I wasn't fighting for their approval. I've always played for the acceptance of my godfather and father. That's it. And now my father's gone."

His voice, cracking throughout, finally gives up here, done fighting. Barry Bonds, so impenetrable, so defiant, so very strong, is on the verge of tears. He is slumped in a chair in front of his locker, and he stays quiet for 10 ... 20 ... 30 seconds, the silence helping keep down what might bubble over with a nudge from but one more syllable.

Bonds stares straight ahead in the completely vacant visitors clubhouse in San Diego, suddenly avoiding eye contact. He doesn't like revealing himself because, as he explained politely but firmly at this conversation's start, "my career is an open book, but my life is not." Finally, after a full minute of silence, Bonds rubs a hand slowly over his weary face, sniffles and looks up at the clock through glassy, bloodshot eyes.

He hasn't stretched. He took fewer than five minutes' worth of swings during batting practice. He tried to take a nap on the trainer's table, with the aid of NyQuil, but failed miserably. That, and a giant cup of straight black coffee, is the extent of his pregame preparation. And now it is six minutes to game time.

Later, after tracing the arc of Barry's career in the shadow of father Bobby and godfather Willie Mays, Le Batard continues:

"The doctors didn't know how my father was still alive, with cancer in his kidney, lungs, two tumors in his brain and open-heart surgery, but he stayed around long enough to tell me everything at the end -- how much he loved me, how proud he was," Barry says. "Everything poured out. I wouldn't wish this on anybody, but the one thing that makes it better -- better, not easier -- is that I was there at the end. I didn't leave his side. I have my dad's approval. Now it's just Willie I'm after. It's time to get Willie's. And Willie won't let me rest, man. He doesn't want to give it to me. He's afraid of the same thing I am -- that I'll quit on the spot."

Bonds isn't quitting the game. What he's doing is taking a bat to it, one historic whack at a time. Retirement? That's just the frailty and fatigue talking after a terribly long season. He likes the money too much, and the challenges. Bonds admits as much now. He says he plans to play out the final two years of his contract (and collect $36M), at least. But throw the retirement talk into the maw of the multiheaded beast he's fighting now -- his father's death, the feds busting down the door at his strength coach's house in search of who knows what, the perpetual tension with the media, the chasing of his first championship at 39 -- and what you've unleashed is a gladiator who would make Maximus wet his pants.

An incredible peek behind the curtain, indeed.

• • •

But that isn't the only reason I've come around on Barry. The death of Bobby Bonds continues to resonate in my mind. In the days leading up to his demise, I'd been off the grid, backpacking with my father and brother, and fervently reading Roger Kahn's amazing The Boys of Summer, a book that for all of my Dodger fandom had somehow escaped my reading list. Disguised as a baseball book, Kahn's masterful tome is a medititation on mortality and a brilliant, poignant study of the flawed beauty of the human organism.

In part, The Boys of Summer serves as a memoir of Kahn's two seasons working the Brooklyn Dodger beat as a writer for the New York Herald Tribune, covering Jackie Robinson, Pee Wee Reese, Duke Snider, and the rest as they battle the New York Yankees in search of their first World Championship. In part, it's a nostalgia piece detailing Kahn's journeys to revisit those players twenty years later, reflect on their careers, and explore the ways their lives after baseball unfolded. And in part, it's a poignant tale of a father-son bond cemented by baseball. Former college second baseman and father of the author Gordon Kahn taught his son the game, its fundamentals and its lore, just as countless other fathers taught their sons baseball -- Bobby Bonds and Richard Jaffe included.

Whether we grow up to be ballplayers or writers or brain surgeons, as children we come to the game via our fathers (and sometimes our mothers) -- somebody who throws us fat whiffle-ball pitches in the backyard, who explains why the glove goes on the opposite hand from the one we throw with, who takes us to the ballpark for the first time and patiently endures our barrage of questions as we struggled to reconcile the stadium game with our own narrow backyard experience, who teaches us how to read a box score and how to fill out a scorecard. Ideally baseball isn't the only vehicle for our bonding, but it's a sure one, with a built-in mechanism for measuring the passage of years and our own growth.

In addition to the fundamentals and the lore, Gordon Kahn bestowed a love of the Brooklyn Dodgers on his son Roger, and the two of them endured Dem Bums' fruitless attempts to beat the imperial Yankees in the Fall Classic. Shortly after Kahn's second season covering the Dodgers, in which they lost the 1953 World Series to the Yanks (just as they had in 1952, not to mention 1949, 1947, and 1941), his father dropped dead of a heart attack. The "next year" for which the Dodges and their fans waited lay a mere two years after Gordon Kahn's death, but the father could no longer wait.

I didn't turn out to be a beat reporter like Roger Kahn or a big-league ballplayer (a shoulder injury this past June killed any chances I had of being summoned by Brian Cashman as a solution to the Yankee middle relief woes). But I'm lucky enough to have my sixty-two year old father still coaching me, advising me on the finer points of work, money, travel, fishing, wine, women, and song. I can only imagine the devastation, the void I would feel if I lost that at a time, like Kahn and Bonds, when I feel my best days -- marriage, children, maybe a book, whatever -- are still to come. My heart goes out to Barry Bonds, who's finally showed me that he has one.

Bonds is now five homers away from topping his godfather for third on the all-time home run list. He's 59 away from topping the Babe, and an even 100 away from topping Hank Aaron's mark at the summit of Mount Homer. Barring injury and assuming he can add a few more homers before the end of this season, that gives Bonds a very good shot of challenging Aaron's mark by the end of 2005. If he gets the mark, he will have earned it, playing in a hitters' era but a difficult pitchers' park, and through a strategy in which challenging him to hit is the last thing any pitcher wants to do.

We can pile the superlatives on Barry Bonds, and marvel at his eye-popping numbers. But whatever words we ascribe to him, "immortality" is one we can skip. This sad summer has shown us all just how mortal Barry Bonds is, and how mighty his accomplishments are in the face of that.