Barry Bonds Ruined Everything

Dear Five Tool Fool,

It has come to our attention that your organization has failed to create the required amount of copy on the subject of Barry Bonds.

Please rectify immediately, as per the terms of your contract with Gawker Media, ESPN, and our secret corporate overlords, Google.

Failure to do will result, of course, in a garnishment of your wages.

Sincerely,

Will Leith
Secretary General of the Glorious International Kollektiv of Sports Bloggers

P.S. Stop emailing me, or I will release the commenter monkeys.



Dear Will Et Al,

I’m so sorry. Really, I am. It’s just that I’m starting a new job, and you know how I’ve been having issues with the drywall, and shouldn’t last night’s hand job to LeBron count towards my required quota of Extremely Obvious Topics?

No. Crap. Um, OK, here goes...

There are, of course, dozens of hypocrisies in the case of Barry Bonds – and I’d argue that the hypocrisies are what define him now, more than the numbers, more than the means, more than the circus. But the biggest and most central hypocrisy is this…

Team achievements matter more than individual ones.

That is no longer true, if it ever really was. And that, more than anything, is what helps to explain the seismic differences between Bonds Haters, Bonds Neutralists, and Bonds Fans. (The latter probably only exist in San Francisco now, but when the media pounds a black guy long enough, he develops a fan base among minorities. Barry is as black as OJ. But that’s a whole ‘nother column...)

A story you used to hear a lot was how people would feel bad for the long-suffering – oh, how they suffered – superstar on a bad team. Your team would be pounding the stuffing out of, say, the Atlanta Braves. Dale Murphy would hit a home run to cut the lead to five. The color analyst would go on about how everyone feels bad that a quality guy like Murph is on a team like this, losing 100+ games a year, but trying so hard… and you know, he’d trade those MVP awards and all those home runs to just be on a winner, you just know he would.



Which was probably bullshit, in that Murph probably enjoyed being paid. Sure, the losing was a drag, but that’s why they call it work, right?

Now, has anyhow ever made the Feel Bad For This God Among Flawed Men speech about Bonds, outside of the Bay Area?

For the majority of the latter days of his career in Atlanta and Milwaukee, Hank Aaron’s teams were like the team of Murphy. And yet, because he had The Record, his place in baseball history, his legacy, was more than secure. No one would remember the months of playing out the string, alongside teammates and behind pitching staffs who no one remembers. Quick, name the NL West division champion in 1974, the year Aaron broke the record. (Answer: LA, who lost to Oakland in the World Series. But I had to look it up.)

Bonds will be like that. No one, outside of Giants fans, will remember that on The Day Barry Broke The Record, Matt Morris and Kevin Correia (I’m just throwing out names of mediocrities here – feel free to substitute with any SF pitcher) gave up three homers in a 7-4 loss. Or that the team that he set the record on won 78 games. Or that despite all of his big numbers, he had only one positive playoff year. (OK, maybe the haters will remember that last one, but they will talk more about how his head was the size of a watermelon.)

Baseball media don’t talk about the best players who haven’t won a World Series… because who wins the World Series doesn’t really matter that much, unless it is your team that did it. (You do, of course, hear this kind of thing in football all the time about quarterbacks, or in the NBA about big scorers.)

Little wonder, then, especially in an era where fantasy sports eliminates the idea of the star player putting up numbers in an attention-free vacuum, that we gravitate to the One over the Team.

Little wonder, then, that people who still care more about teams – or, for that matter, winners and losers – are paying little to no attention to the Bonds Chase. It’s not just that he’s on the West Coast, folks.

(Sure, some tune out on the moral objection of Bonds being remarkably unpleasant and a cheat. But it’s not like baseball hasn’t had a million of those over the years. Bonds is just more talented than most, and had access to better chemicals. Ty Cobb would have injected infant bone marrow into his eyeballs in the on-deck circle if he thought it would have helped. Pete Rose, too. Willie Mays played until he was a shell of his former self – you think he wouldn’t have cut a corner to be better at the end? Again, this is a different column.)

Whether or not the rise of individual over team is a good thing is up to the individual fans. The natural instinct is to point at this and say how it’s the clearest reason why the whole world is going to Hell In A Handbasket. If you’re not inclined to think that way about changes in the world, you shrug and go back to checking you fantasy league roster.

For myself, I am mostly ambivalent about Bonds and the rise of the Individual over the Team – which is part of why there hasn’t been much on FTT about him. The people that he infuriates most are sportswriters, who are paid to be infuriated, and as a group, about as pleasant to deal with as Barry himself.

His Giants teams are on a treadmill to nowhere, and yet he makes them watchable, even if it’s in a Tyson-esque way. If he were to suffer a career-ending injury tomorrow, their season would be about as entertaining as that of the Kansas City Royals. I was in the Bay Area during 2005, when Bonds wasn’t playing due to injury. The team and its fans were like smack junkies going cold turkey. Determining whether Pedro Feliz is ever going to turn the corner – not quite as interesting as whether or not the all-time record is going to be set. So long as you’re not getting a playoff race, why not live in the sideshow?

As for Hell in a Handbasket... I have never enjoyed watching sports more than now, despite the lack of a championship for any of my favorite teams. I can’t imagine going back to a time when the only things I cared about were the plights of my favorite teams.

The toothpaste is out of the tube. We’re all league-wide fans now, and we’re all witnesses to history.

For our team, and for every other.