Everybody hates Barry. The fans hate Barry. Sports writers hate Barry. Congress hates Barry. Teammates hate Barry. Ex-girlfriends hate Barry. Really, everybody hates Barry. It’s what you’re supposed to do if your a baseball fan. It’s been like that for a while. I mean, the guy has always been a dick. Teammates fight with him. To say he’s cold toward fans is putting it lightly. He’s just an arrogant asshole. Which is fine, because he’s the best ball player of his time. He can get away with that. As long as he’s out there playing ball the way Barry Bonds plays ball, you can get over the character flaws. Baseball has had plenty of assholes. For Christ sake, Ty Cobb jumped into the stands once to pummel a black guy he thought was taunting him. But in baseball, you judge the man on how he plays the game.
And for a while, nobody could knock how he played the game. Then steroids came into baseball, and everything got flipped on it’s head. And thanks to the bestseller Game of Shadows written by two San Francisco sportswriters, which chronicles his descend into performance enhancing drugs including steroids, Barry Bonds is public enemy 1. In most baseball fans’ eyes, he personifies everything that is wrong with the game. And you know what? They’re dead wrong. Barry Bonds didn’t ruin baseball. As a matter of fact, he saved it.
The 1990′s were good to Barry Bonds. By the time the ’98 season rolled up, he had already racked up three NL MVP awards as well as seven golden gloves. He had led the league in on-base percentage four times and slugging percentage three times. When he wasn’t named MVP, he was consistently just a few votes out of the top spot. It was clear to most that Barry Bonds was the best baseball player playing the game. Then came the summer of ’98. And shit got all fucked up. That’s the season the fat Mick and fat Dominican pulled their love parade through baseball stadiums all over the country. Sosa and McGwire were there for us, blowing kisses, pounding there hearts, hugging there fat-ass ballboy kids and slapping dingers to make us all feel all warm and fuzzy again about our national past time.
And in doing so, they fucked up baseball real good. And when the dust settled and the fans went home, the most prestigious record in baseball was held by a red-beaked Irishman in his mid-thirties. So Barry took steroids.
He didn’t want to take steroids. He never wanted to. Steroids make you die younger and Barry Bonds is the most egotistical man on the planet, people who love themselves as much as he does don’t want to die young, they want to go on loving themselves forever. He had twelve amazing years under his belt. He could have walked into the sunset and held his head high. But he knew what he had to do. People say Barry took performance enhancing drugs for selfish reasons, but that’s just stupid. He took them for the good of the game.
C’mon, seriously. What looks better for your sport. Having the most respected single season record held by a black guy, or an Irish guy? Exactly. He was just cleaning up what McGwire fucked up. (If an Irish guy ever holds a cherished record in your sport in this day and age, either your sport sucks or he cheated.) McGwire’s hilarious, he puts up 70 homers and is out of the game in two years due to old age. “Why’d you retire?” “Just got too old to play the game.” “But you hit 70 homers last season.” “Yep.”
Bonds did it right. He let all these guys get there first crack at all the dope and all the records. He let’em have all their fun. Then he juiced like a maniac, doubled his head size and took back the record books along with the game. Thanks to Barry, everything makes sense again. Now we can say that baseball’s biggest record is held by the best baseball player we ever saw. Not by some fat Irishman who did it at 36. That would just be stupid.
