The Futility Infielder

Barry Bonds has had a rough offseason. His BALCO grand jury testimony was leaked, he's endured three knee surgeries since October (two on the right knee), he's been threatened with a subpoena to appear before Congress, and on Sunday it was revealed that his former longtime girlfriend sang allegations of his steroid usage and potentially unreported income to the BALCO grand jury.

Bonds went to Orange Alert on Tuesday, five days after his most recent surgery. He told reporters that he might miss part or even all of the season, and shifted a good deal of the blame to the media for his physical and psychological ailments:

"My family's tired. You [media] guys wanted to hurt me bad enough, you finally got there.

"You wanted me to jump off the bridge, I finally have jumped. You wanted to bring me down. You've finally brought me and my family down. Finally done it. From everybody, all of you. So now go pick a different person. I'm done. Do the best I can, that's about it."

When asked if there was something specific he was talking about, Bonds said, "Inner hurt, physical, mentally. Done. I'm mentally drained. I'm tired of my kids crying. Tired."

Bonds used the word tired no fewer than 14 times in his soul-baring spiel yesterday, dragging his 15-year-old son into a surreal photo op. If it didn't sell particularly well, it's because we're all as tired of Barry Bonds as he is of... well, everybody. It's tough to muster sympathy for the man right now. He's spent the past five years thumbing his nose at the media, and for him to blame them for his downfall is both laughable and pathetic. His problems beyond these multiple knee woes are of his own making, from his involvement in BALCO to his alleged tax woes to the ways he's defied reporters over the years.

The brazenly defiant stance works well when you're hitting homers at unprecedented rates and can tell writers exactly how far up their own ass they can go, but not so well when you don't have a bat to do the talking. So Bonds switched to playing the sympathy card, perhaps because after watching the media coil rope for Mark McGwire in the wake of his Capitol Hill clam-up, he realized that playing the race card was an even tougher sell.

I'll be the first to admit that I'm not the world's biggest Barry Bonds fan, though my distaste for the man goes well beyond which side of the fence I fall in the Dodger/Giant rivalry. In the manner of another another megasuperstar, Michael Jordan, Bonds' combination of arrogance and dominance has left me ever colder as the broken records piled up. For all of the grandeur of his accomplishments, he's spent too long showing the world his own hard-heartedness, and on Tuesday the world received the opportunity to give that lack of love right back. He's as much as told us he didn't need anybody in his corner, and now that's exactly what he's got.

I'm sorry Bonds' body isn't working and that he won't be able to make Opening Day. Beyond that, I'm just fine watching his chickens come home to roost, watching him at the center of this Greek tragedy, felled by his own hubris. My inner Nelson Muntz is having a field day. Cue the "Schadenfreude" song.

During his homer-happy ascendency, I had maintained a cool neutrality when it came to Bonds. Pitched to or around, either way it made the highlight footage, but at some point the homers became as boring as the walks, the spectacular mundane. The big shot at the World Championship that had long eluded him? I couldn't root for the Giants there, but I was happy to see him shed his lingering reputation for postseason choking. Happier still to see him misplay Troy Glaus' hit in the rally that forced a seventh game.

Mostly neutral I was, until Bonds started smack-talking the Bambino in the summer of 2003:

"The only number I care about is Babe Ruth's. Because as a left-handed hitter, I wiped him out... That's it. In the baseball world, Babe Ruth's everything, right? I got his slugging percentage and I'll take his home runs and that's it. Don't talk about him no more."

The slight was unnecessary and inaccurate, even coming from a star of Bonds' magnitude, because for all of the records the Bambino held or still holds, it's his cultural impact and his legend that remain even more impressive. Just ask Pedro Martinez about the wisdom of tap-dancing on the Bambino's grave, or the entirety of Red Sox Nation, which spent 86 painful years trying to chase his ghost away.

As I pointed out , Bonds' comments were factually way out of line.

• Bonds (.595) is still 95 points of slugging percentage behind the Babe (.690), and one year or two years or five of BB at his current level ain't gonna get him there even if he passes Ruth in total homers.

• Bonds would still need to rattle off something along the lines of a 94-46 record with a 122 ERA+ as a pitcher to approach the Babe's total contribution on the diamond in the regular season.

• Bonds would need to PITCH THE RED SOX TO A WORLD CHAMPIONSHIP (or two) before he could top the Babe as far as World Series feats go.

• When that happens (i.e., when Hell freezes over and I vote Republican), Bonds will still trail the Babe in the sheer weight of his total contribution to American culture. Where's Barry's home run for the dying kid, or his "Called Shot"? Who cares that he makes more than the President of the United States? Which enemy of ours will charge into battle telling American soldiers, "To Hell with Barry Bonds!"?

Soon afterwards, I found myself in Bonds' corner. His raw displays of emotion upon the deteriorating health and ultimate death of his father, Bobby Bonds, showed an unseen side at a time when the topic of fathers and sons was heavily on my mind; I had recently Roger Kahn's The Boys of Summer while backpacking with my Dad. Keyed by an amazing Dan Le Batard article in ESPN Magazine, I wrote a piece that remains a personal favorite:

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.

...I didn't turn out to be a beat reporter like Roger Kahn or a big-league ballplayer ... 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.

...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.

It didn't take Bonds long to piss away that reservoir of sympathy, however. Two months after that article, he announced that he was pulling out of the Major League Baseball Players' Association's licensing agreement, a cash grab out of naked greed.

Then came BALCO and the leaking of grand jury testimony, which for purposes of brevity and vomit reduction, I'll skip except to say that Bonds' preservation of deniability in his own testimony was seen as one more act of defiance. Flax seed oil? Right. The media couldn't hang him as they did Jason Giambi, but Bonds' slippery denials only increased their appetite for blood.

Thanks to his good fortune never to have played with Jose Canseco, he managed to keep a relatively low profile this spring, even as the Congressional Hearings on Grandstanding Over Steroids put the topic on the front pages. The day of the hearings, Bonds went down for his third surgery of the winter, one that was reported as putting him out of the season's first month. The anesthesia had hardly worn off before the San Francisco Chronicle ran with the girlfriend story:

Prosecutors in the BALCO steroids conspiracy case subpoenaed a former girlfriend of Barry Bonds to testify before a federal grand jury in San Francisco last week, questioning her about the Giants star's finances and whether he used steroids, The Chronicle has learned.

Kimberly Bell, 35, a graphic artist from San Jose who says she dated Bonds from 1994 to 2003, told the grand jury Thursday that in 2000, the left fielder confided to her that he had begun using steroids, according to two sources familiar with an account of her testimony.

Bell also testified that in 2001, Bonds had given her $80,000 in cash -- earned, she claimed, from his sale of autographed baseballs and other memorabilia -- to make the down payment on a house for her in Scottsdale, Ariz., near the Giants' spring training facility, the sources said.

True or not, leaked or not, the money issue means that the IRS heat is now on Bonds, if it weren't already. That may be the straw that broke the camel's back, because suddenly Barry Bonds has bigger fish to fry than the home run records of Babe Ruth and Hank Aaron. Even if he's not the target of the BALCO investigation, tax evasion is a different problem entirely. Nobody wants the IRS up in their grill. Just ask Pete Rose.

As real as Bonds' frustration and as serious as his legal situation may be, his timetable for returning is probably overstated. The guess here is that he'll miss no more than two months of the season. His world may be a mess, but the one place Barry Bonds can control things is in the batter's box. Without that control and outlet for his anger, he's lost. But don't expect any cheers here if and when he surmounts the Babe and the Hammer, and don't be surprised at the frigid response he receives from fans outside San Francisco. Bonds has never taken them into his heart, why should they take him into theirs?

For more coverage of Bonds' situation and its impact on the Giants, please check out my latest Prospectus Triple Play at BP.

Labels: steroids