by rep » Wed Apr 26, 2006 7:43 pm
this got away from me and i just sort of wrote. i apologize in advance for the length.
my feelings on him are mixed and have a tendency to change from interview to interview and i usually hate him on tuesdays when he refers to himself in the third person. but...
bonds will finish his career as he has in almost everything else with the exception of the single season home run title...second to somebody. that said...second is ahead of a lot of people.
until the steroid thing is proved one way or the other, he will always be remembered with an astrix, regardless if he is guilty or innocent. i can live with it if he can, but i'm not exactly a baseball purist either. i am perfectly fine with acknowledging his numbers, but taking into account the time and the circumstances surrounding the game when they happened.
anymore with how absurd the 'legal' system is, even if he is proved guilty there will be a way to cast doubt. and if he is proven innocent there will still be a dark cloud hanging over him. at the end of the day, him being 'proven' guilty or innocent really doesn't change much in my mind.
i haven't spent one dollar to go and watch bonds play, so i don't feel like i was somehow cheated by him. he gave me free entertainment for over a decade. congrats. i would have bought cable t.v. anyway.
bonds can probably be summed up with having a hall of fame career and a six-year old's ability to relate with the rest of the world. he will retire with more money than 90 percent of the countries in the world, so his kids should be happy. he was a great player before people started associating him with steroids.
i have a problem with anyone that uses a personal website to relay information and doesn't talk to the media. yeah, a lot of media-types are looking to make their name on personal trash. but how many journalists were right there with baited breathe when he was slamming homers and going to n.l. championships and the world series? how many of them said they could die happy when barry went from pittsburgh to san fran? i have a problem with anyone who broad-strokes a group of people as worthless, because just like everything else, there are good and bad and generally the bad stick out in your mind more than the good.
for some reason, and i'm not sure why, i don't feel the hatred towards bonds that i feel towards sammy sosa, who to me was an average mlb player at best before he started magically hitting a lot of home runs and then cashed in. after cashing in he became a worthless person and a few years later a worthless player. maybe i don't hate bonds because watching him hobble around the bases now suddenly makes up for years of him being a snob and i pity him. i'm sure bonds would love to know a white kid from north dakota pities him.
bonds was by no means a great teammate from everything i've read, but i think besides getting into it with jeff kent, he stayed to himself. sosa made sure to blare his stereo every day and to me seemed to really only care about his statline at the end of the day.
i think that the one thing that i do like is that bonds basically admits he is a jerk. at least he is honest. he doesn't want people to just forgive (rafael palmero) or forget (mark mcguire). maybe he is worse and is just lying. who knows, i don't.
all i know is that players like ryne sandberg, andre dawson, robin yount, dale murphy, rollie fingers, kirby and nolan ryan wouldn't be anything like bonds because it wouldn't be right. they are from a different generation of baseball and those guys are my heros, not bonds. and really, i'm okay with that and i'm sure bonds didn't want to be anyone's role model anyway.
like most things, just go away barry and stay away. please don't show up dancing on a reality t.v. show or riding jet skis in some fake competition on espn. enjoy your retirement and with any luck you don't have knees that are made of plastic when you die. 10,000 years from now when someone digs up your grave, your body will look really funny.