Achievement and Dignity Go Hand-In-Hand: Two Reasons Why I Now Care About the Barry Bonds Debacle

Baseball is about 85% commercialism/circus/greed (which is crazy because I've always thought of myself as 85% cynic....huh). And out of that 85%, Barry Bonds is responsible for about 90% of the fiasco (give or take a few points one way or the other – it’s not exactly a science). He personifies what is wrong with Major League Baseball (And I really know this is how I must feel because, and this may be my ego, this is such a popular opinion that I've fought agreeing with it for along time).

Trust me on this one. Do not try to hug Barry Bonds. I’m just saying because in some of his pictures, he almost looks huggable. Just trust me.

The days of the kids looking through the knot-holes are over. I feel like I’ve known that for awhile. So I’ve not cared about Barry Bonds. I figured that steroids only made you stronger. I didn’t see how they could help you connect a round bat with a round ball that has been hurled and spun by a highly trained professional who is paid to make it that much more difficult to hit. As if it wasn’t already hard enough, I’d murmur back to the TV. As if steroids can unfairly aide this unique skill of Barry’s.

Unfair amounts of power aside, Barry Bonds can consistently connect the round bat with the round ball. Go ahead…do a Matrix/stop-action movie clip in your head of a ball making contact with a bat. There is not much surface area. The game seems like a fluke. When I think about it this way, how can anybody do anything but foul?

But Barry can hit the ball solidly. And he can do it consistently. That is why he’s less than a season away from breaking Hank Aaron’s all-time Home Run record (755 lifetime).

And I’ve not cared. I've figured that steroids can help you look like a blowfish, but they can’t help you maximize the thin surface area shared by balls and bats. That’s just a gift, and Barry’s got it. Stop whining.

But today, reading the paper, I decided (maybe forcibly compelled) to cast my ballot. I wish it was someone else. Not Barry Bonds. He has cheated. It matters. He is a jerk. That matters too. And though I still cynically know that the kids aren’t looking through the knot-holes out in right field, it makes me really wish they were.

I’ve got two reasons that pushed me to express my remorse over Barry’s rise to the top of a very significant list in baseball history.

#1 – THE UNFAIR ADVANTAGE IN HUMAN GROWTH HORMONE
No, steroids do not help increase the surface area of the contact point of a ball and a bat. But in taking steroids, Barry recovers quicker (and I owe Mike L. Morgensen for this insight). His muscles don’t ache. They repair themselves overnight. He is available to play more games per season, giving him more opportunities to break the record. As he gets older, (Barry is 42) the days off in-between games should increase. The days off increased for Willie Mays (660 lifetime), Babe Ruth (714 lifetime), and Hank Aaron. Barry has recently tied Babe Ruth’s total, and is now 21 shy of Hank Aaron (again an astonishing 755 lifetime). If all things were equal, then my hat would be off to Barry. But since he’s been on the sauce, he’s given himself approximately twice as many chances per season to accelerate to the top of the list. In this way, it is clear that steroids are illegal for the same reason that it is illegal to bat fourth, seventh, and ninth in the batting line-up. But in taking steroids, this is essentially the advantage he’s given himself.

He will beat Aaron’s record because he will have had more opportunities to do it. Barry’s record will primarily reflect the athleticism of the men he is passing up. I can’t dismiss his achievement, but I am unwilling to think of him in the same light as these other men.

(I'd be open to being wrong if somebody could produce "comparative number of games played" stats. My assumption about Barry is that he is playing more because of roids. If it's the other kind of "roids," he may well have actually played much fewer games then those other guys. And if so, with a much greater handicap. If he hasn't played more games, I'd consider the wrong-ness of my point. I just don't have the energy to find those stats. If someone (MLM) would want to contribute these stats to the conversation (MLM) please feel free (MLM). Just anybody. Nobody in particular. (MLM))

#2 – HE’S A JERK AND IT MATTERS
I realize that, if sued by Barry, I’d go to court with reason #1 instead of reason #2. But I’ve not been sued, and reason #2 has street credibility. Just ask the fans.

L.A. Times, front page, Friday, April 6th. Staff Writer John M. Glionna shows why Barry will be remembered as a record-holding jerk. The world wants to assign dignity to somebody who does something great. But Barry has clearly given all of his away.

On page A19 of the Times, Glionna writes the following story about Barry’s interaction with former Pirates team photographer, Pete Diana, then goes on to give an account from author Jeff Pearlman:

In 2002, two Pirates grounds-keepers died in a car crash on opening day. Both left their children without health insurance, Diana says.
All season, he asked visiting all-stars such as Sammy Sosa and Randy Johnson to sign mementos for auction to help the families. Everyone agreed –except for Bonds, a former Pirate.
Players warned Diana not to approach the peevish Bonds. “But I figured he knew both men when he played here,” he said. “But when I asked for his help, he cursed at me. I tell you, that guy’s going straight to hell.”
In his biography “Love Me, Hate Me: Barry Bonds and the Making of an Antihero,” author Jeff Pearlman describes how the 12-year-old nephew of Pirates pitcher Danny Darwin once handed Bonds a baseball card to sign. Bonds ripped it in half.
“In the most basic sense, he’s not a nice person,” Pearlman said of Bonds who refused to be interviewed for the book. “He can be charming, but it doesn’t happen often. He’s the most despised athlete in America. In his defense, he’s almost socially retarded. He doesn’t know how to deal with people on a human level. It’s the way he was raised.”

While I do acknowledge that he may have been raised poorly, and do feel bad if he was, I hate to see Barry play the victim. Apparently so does the world. Pearlman does call him “despised.”

Barry is just like the rest of us in a sense. He made a mistake. He wanted to extend his shelf-life so he did like a lot of guys did. I’ve followed the “everybody’s doing it” justification. But because he’s been caught, he’s become the stubborn child who won’t admit it. He’s dug himself a hole and we can all tell that he’ll never surrender. In my view, (but maybe not in views that matter) a lot would be restored if he would admit that he cheated a little, but it got away from him. That it gave him too many opportunities to highlight his natural abilities.

But he can’t be bothered to sign a bat and donate it to families of dead grounds-keepers. He doesn’t sign the 12-year-old’s baseball card, he rips it in half. He gets heckled, but that’s the game. Culture is condemning Barry-the-Cheat even with the sliding scale it uses to assign value. Intuition wins. He could easily make a case that he’s not obligated to sign every card, but he can’t justify ripping them in half. The world knows (intuition is telling us) that Barry Bonds has lost his dignity. And like cake without sugar, achievement is diminished without dignity (if not completely ruined).

I suppose you can have your dignity without high achievement, but I don’t think you can have it the other way around. Isolated, Barry will have his reward in full: a record without his dignity…which, when you think about it, is no reward at all.