I'm horrified by the news about Barry Bonds.
No, not the news in the book by Mark Fainaru-Wada and Lance Williams that says that, well, Barry Bonds took Winstrol. And the Cream. And the Clear. And testosterone decanoate, sometimes known as Mexican beans. And insulin. And human growth hormone. And Clomid, used to treat female infertility. And trenbolone, used to make friggin' cattle more muscular. I'm a bit stunned at the frightful breadth of the shopping list, but I'm not surprised, exactly. In fact, if you can find a Giants fan or Bonds fan out there who is surprised, ask them to come by my house next time there's a poker game going. And bring plenty of money.
No, what horrifies me is the reason offered for why Bonds first turned to the pharmaceutical cupboard after the 1998 season: He was jealous of Mark McGwire, then dominating the headlines during his chase of Roger Maris's record.
Mark McGwire? Really?
Even in the best of times, being a baseball fan means watching your team get beat at least 60 times a year. Losing 60 times a year guarantees some of those losses are going to really hurt — a fatal error, a desperate comeback that falls just short, a reliever spits the bit. Or you wind up facing the other team's best player with everything in the balance, and he carries the day.
I've had an interesting reaction to a small number of players who've beaten us in that situation — regret, almost immediately followed by a quiet acceptance and a little dose of wonder. In such situations, I don't throw things or swear a blue streak or turn on the FAN to be reminded that there are Met fans way crazier than I am. Instead, I find myself thinking, “You know, someday I'll tell my grandchildren that I saw [Player X Who Just Beat Us] play.”
There aren't very many players in that group. The example I always use is Tony Gwynn. But Barry Bonds was in that club — and he was a member before 1999. In his first years with the Pirates you could see he was going to be something special — you knew that perfect swing, those break-the-sound-barrier-fast hands, the superb batting eye and the combination of ferocity and smarts with which he played the game would make him a superstar before long. And he became one, and then he got better in San Francisco, and when he came to town it was an event, and when he beat us, I'd think, “You know, someday I'll tell my grandchildren that I saw Barry Bonds play.”
Mark McGwire? Please. An oversized masher with a feast-or-famine bat, glued to first base, lumbering around the bases. Even before reporters starting asking questions about andro, I never gave him much thought. Did I see Mark McGwire play? Sure, kiddo. But Grandpa saw Dave Kingman and Cecil Fielder and Rob Deer play, too. What of it? (While we're on the subject, I never cared for his unctuous sidekick from the Summer of Drugs, either. Plus Sammy Sosa was a Cub.)
If you weren't careful, McGwire could hit a ball a long way and beat you. Bonds could do that too. But he could also steal bases and beat you. Or gun down your runners and beat you. McGwire seemed a nice enough guy, and genuinely passionate about abused kids, but I can't remember an interview with him that amounted to more than back-of-the-Bull-Durham-bus cliches and bromides about family. Bonds wasn't a nice guy, but on the rare occasions he felt like talking, he was funny and intriguing and very, very smart.
But wait, you say: Mark McGwire was an event in '98. Well, yeah, but not one I wanted any part of. I remember the fans who came to Shea for Mets-Cards in '98. Not many of them struck me as Mets fans, or even Cardinals fans — who are reliably inoffensive in their Midwestern way. No, the McGwire attendees were the kind of fans you see at Shea in the playoffs or for Mets-Yankees: the clueless and the bored, the ones who spend half the game on their cellphones and eat their one hot dog at arm's length from whatever expensive nonballpark attire they have on, the ones who give you the gimlet eye if you ask them not to stand up throughout another inning and seem vaguely affronted that their chatter has to compete with discussions of the actual game. Long home runs were the fad that summer, but the folks who came to Shea to see them would have been equally happy to watch, say, cockfighting or demolition derby. Later, Bonds would attract these idiots too — but then that's part of the tragedy of Barry Bonds.
Yep, I called it a tragedy. I'll go further, in fact: Barry Bonds is the stuff of Shakespearean tragedy. A man who grew up in baseball clubhouses, whose godfather was Willie Mays, who saw his father's career derailed by alcohol and a bad reputation, one that may or may not have been earned. Who then surpassed his father in every respect, something that can't have been simple or easy for one proud, defiant man raised by another. A man I'd call the greatest player of his generation — and who was that before 1999. A man who was one of the greatest players in baseball history — before 1999. A man who was in the I'll-tell-my-grandkids-I-saw-him-play club — before 1999. Barry Bonds was great before you could buy great in a syringe or an ointment or something to stick under your tongue. And he destroyed all of it because he was jealous of Mark McGwire?
Mark McGwire! Destined to be remembered for a virtual-asterisked single season, who showed up before a congressional panel looking shrunken and lost, and took a match to his reputation in a few shameful minutes of pathetic ducking and weaving. Mark McGwire's name should have been all but forgotten while Bonds's was still mentioned in awe, and now, because Barry Bonds somehow didn't realize or didn't care that he was already the kind of player Mark McGwire could only dream of being, the two of them will be linked forever. Sure, Bonds took that home-run record away. Fat lot of good it will do him now.
There are steroids in baseball? Not news to me — hell, there's a Met or two whom I strongly suspect knew his way around the business end of a syringe.
Barry Bonds is a jerk of the first order? I don't particularly care — I think I'd be unhappy to find out how many players are.
The greatest player of his generation burned down his own legacy because he wanted the attention given to a bottle-bred circus freak by a cynical sport and its dimwitted pretend fans? I do care about that. In fact, it makes me furious. What a waste. What an absolutely infuriating, frustrating, confounding, horrifying, tragic waste.
And this is someone who always claimed not to care what anyone thinks. But I've always suspected the opposite and this proves it.
When I heard of the jealousy angle, I flashed back to the steamy Friday night of August 21, 1998. I had just watched the Mets beat the Cardinals 1-0 in the second game of a doubleheader from the cauldron of the left field mezzanine with you and Emily. Armando Reynoso pitched a gem, making a first-inning Edgardo Alfonzo home run off Manny Aybar (!) stand up over seven innings, and the newly emerged, rosin-slamming Turk Wendell saved the day by retiring the man everybody came to see in a total game situation in the eighth. It was magnificent in that regard.
But, as you pointed out, Shea was infested with frontrunners that night. I picked up on one of your many brilliant ideas from over the years and started booing McGwire every time he came up. Not booing McGwire so much as booing those who wildly cheered an opponent in the middle of a sweaty, lipbiting Wild Card race. One standing ovation first time up? Sure. Appreciative applause if the game's not on the line. OK. But root for the Cardinal against the Mets at Shea Stadium? Yeech. It was us versus 52,000 supplicants of the trendy. I can still see the guy in the spanking new red Cardinals No. 25 batting practice jersey in the next row turning around from his eighth or ninth Budweiser (Go St. Louis!) and threatening us with nonspecific bodily harm for our insolence, and insulting Rusty Staub as someone who had never challenged Roger Maris. (That'll show us.)
As we were leaving down the ramp in the glow of victory (having avoided any further wrath from the anti-Rusty contingent when No. 25 presumably fell asleep under a urinal), I wondered aloud why people crowded ballparks to go moony for McGwire and silly for Sosa but barely touched the turnstiles for the finest player of the current generation, Barry Bonds. Emily rather quickly nailed it: “Because Barry Bonds is a jerk” or something to that accurate effect. Yeah, I thought, I guess he is. But still…
Before realignment solved the problem for me, I used to sit up nights and work out what I considered more equitable schedules for baseball teams. Why, I asked Bernie The Cat (the only one awake at that hour), doesn't MLB just follow the NBA's example and focus on intradivision games? That way when the Giants come in with Barry Bonds, it will be an event, like when Magic Johnson would come to the Garden with the Lakers. Baseball eventually evolved in that direction (guess Bernie must've gotten Bud Selig on the phone) yet Barry Bonds was never Michael Jordan at the gate, at least not until 2001, and then not on the McGwirean scale. Once he started hitting home runs (and walking) at Cyborg rates, he was certainly a draw, but it was nothing like the McGwire chase. Why not, I still wondered. Because he was a jerk, I assumed.
So when the jealousy revelation came out the other day, it made perfect sense to me. Sad sense, but sense. Let's not take anything away from McGwire just because he drew a particularly undiscerning crowd. He put on a helluva show for a couple of years and he wasn't, you know, a jerk about it per se. But he was never Barry Bonds. Barry Bonds having to go about his breathtaking career in the shadows of a two-headed freak show (no, I never liked Sosa much either) and feel burned by it almost shows he's human.
It would be perversely endearing if he weren't such a jerk.
I have to say something nice about Mark McGwire, because he was my middle child's favorite player.
I remember a game in late 1998 in St. Louis. McGwire was called out on strikes in the first inning, he argued the call, and the ump ejected him. As you can imagine, the St. Louis crowd gave the umpire a hard time for the rest of the game.
After the game, McGwire spoke to the media. He said that he was wrong for arguing the call, the ump was absolutely right for ejecting him, and the fans were wrong for hassling the ump.
I just remember thinking how nice it was to see someone admit that he was wrong instead of making excuses about it.
I'm not excusing the Andro or steroids or anything else. But there was something about McGwire that made rooting for him back then feel right.
I remember that game too, and you're absolutely right, he was classy about it. It's rare for an athlete to admit he was wrong, let alone be gracious about it.
Perhaps McGwire can use that as the template for admitting a whole lot more. Though it would involve him being somewhere to “talk about the past.”
I can sympathize with this “greatest ever, even before 1999” stuff. But can we at least all remember in all our fond and pitiful recollections that this is the same man who, mid-season, stood perfectly still in left field while watching a high line drive from some 1995 (or thereabouts) Met that he *thought* was a home run. Only finally moving when he realized the ball had actually bounded off the top of the wall and in play behind him, showing up his pitcher and team, and giving up a run or two in the process? Then…after the game, the five-time gold glover lied and said he never saw the ball? Or…….heard the bat…
Neither of these comprise the worst offense we've ever seen on a baseball field. Or off it. Or even by one of it's great stars. Heck…it's not even the worst offense involving something a star thought was or wasn't a baseball. But it's pretty crappy. It just goes to show you that people loaded with talent can pretty much do whatever the hell they want and get away with it. Which kind of leads us to where we are with Barry right now.
The “jealous of McGwire” stuff actually rang kind of hollow to me the moment I heard it. Maybe it's all these grains of salt I carry around with me…maybe it's my own closed mind. But while the timing of the purported drug use fits nicely with when his body started to look superinhuman, and while his eventual shattering of McGwire's record makes us all go “hmmm”, the simple jealousy angle doesn't ring quite right. What makes a little more sense (and I don't know if the book actually goes so far as to say this) the national attention given to McGwire and Sosa combined with inside-the-game knowledge that the two former stick figures had actually done it with female horse tranquilizer or whatever. I can see that pushing an obsessive ego-inflated Bonds over the top and lead to him doing whatever he could to find that edge and trump the two of them. I just wonder how he of the Already Overblown Persecution Complex never had the foresight to realize that the national attention wasn't going to be quite the same when he got around to shattering all the records. Maybe he did and didn't care. There's an element to Barry of not caring…of being happy in an almost psychotic way that he, as his hatsize, is bigger than the game. Content that nobody knows the real Barry, kind of thing. But, to me, the real Barry is a gruff, unlikeable cheat who has effectively placed himself above the game. With, as Murph would say, a wooooorrrld of talent. To others, he is, pills down, one of the all-time greats, and always will be.
I don't mean to cloy, but it's a game we all cherish. So wonderful is it that it supplies something no other team sport that matters does… built-in room for individuals to shine. A place for people to be something…something big….and still stay within the confines of baseball. But people this big, that shine this bright that still need to matter more aren't content with staying in those confines. If they're already big enough, they continue expanding and… eventually collapse on themselves*. It's something that plays out in nature every few million years. We don't dub them stars for nothing.
I think when it came down to it, Bonds craved immortality. Beyond legend and beyond lasting memory. He will be discussed through the ages, and the baseball encyclopedia will never officially be closed on him. That is immortality. That is Barry Bonds.
* – When a supergiant supernovas, it shines brighter than the entire galaxy for a few brief memorable seconds. Then it either becomes a very dense neutron star, or a black hole. I suppose it's gonna be up to history to decide which one Bonds is…
Nicely said. And I'm always a sucker for a good physics metaphor.
Yep, we do cherish this silly game, and it leaves us (or maybe just me) subject to being absurdly disappointed by the unsurprising failings of rich, arrogant young men who have played a good chunk of their lives under different rules than those of us not blessed with the same amount of fast-twitch muscle fiber. Baseball's so marvelous that it makes me subconsciously expect the men who play it — many of whom seem, alas, to be dimwits, divas and douchebags — to be that way too. Football? I'll watch it when I get desperate, but I could really give a fuck when football players turn out to be horrible people. It's a nasty, brutish, drug-fueled business larded up with stupid bureaucratic rules, so what do I care that it's played by nasty, drug-fueled brutes?
It was a Kelly Stinnett double that Bonds decided would be a homer. Unlike Bonds that day, good catch. It's an effective putdown of the world's greatest player (pre-Vlad), noting that he hasn't always actually played.
I'm moved to recall in all this a profile GQ's Peter Richmond did of the game's emerging megastar, probably on the heels of his breakout 1993 season. Bonds was, essentially, a dick about the whole thing, keeping him waiting, so on and so forth. When he finally sat down with him in some fancy restaurant of the player's choosing, Bonds was both interesting and cheap. Stuck Richmond with the bill without a word. (It may be journalistic procedure, but the place wasn't the writer's idea.)
As part of the story, Richmond spoke with godfather Willie Mays in a coffee shop in Northern California. Mays may not be the cheeriest dude on the planet since retiring but Richmond noted that Willie picked up the check. When Richmond protested, Willie would have none of it. Stars, he said, pay.
Some later than others.
Of all things, Bonds' jealousy humanizes him. If you're the best player in the game, and suddenly two guys that you know cheat are outdoing you, what do you do? You A). suck it up and do your best, B). call them out on it, or C). beat them at their own game. We'd all agree A is the course for the Better Man. I'd personally be inclined towards B. Barry went for C. It's a stupid, bad choice, but I can understand it. Not condone it, but understand.
Baseball is bigger than Barry. It will survive even if he is allowed to break Aaron's record. 200 years from now people will know how he did it. In the end, he's hurt himself and his legacy more than anything else.
“Grandpa saw Dave Kingman and Cecil Fielder and Rob Deer play, too. What of it?”
442 career dingers in the 70s and 80s, for bad teams playing mostly in pitchers' parks, are nothing to sneeze about.
KingmanFan is not “anonymous”.
Jace, I'll go on further on your Shakespearean tragedy (although not too far, since the only Shakespeare schooling I got was minimal and against my will)…I think Barry is further jealous because, although he exceeded McGwire in exploits, he was never able to win over the public.
This puts Barry Bonds in the class of a budding comic book arch-enemy. Superhero outshines similarly muscled guy. Guy gets jealous and goes on maniacal regimen to try to outdo superhero. Guy winds up outdoing superhero, but becomes bitter because he doesn't have the same personality to win over the hearts of the public, even though he knows he can beat up superhero. Guy becomes arch enemy.
Or maybe a better analogy is Rocky V…we just need McGwire to come out of retirement, hit 96 HR's and clobber a Don King knockoff while doing it.
Given that McGwire has apparently retired to some sort of Fortress of Solitude, this analogy holds water.
I'm not privvy to Bonds' thoughts but to me “jealousy” is an odd word to use for “wanted the same advantages and rewards” that McGwire was providing himself. Great athletes are frequently prickly, hypercompetitive guys — they will do what they have to to maintain an advantage on others. Bonds used because McGwire used because Canseco used, and so on.
Another analogy — Tony Stewart is if you will the Barry Bonds of Nascar today: Wonderful driver, extremely competitive. But in races at Dayton and Talledega tracks, Nascar's use of “restrictor plates” introduce an artificial limit on the speed at which one can drive — every car goes the same speed; every rookie and stroker is Tony Stewart.
At the Daytona 500 a few weeks ago, Stewart seemed to know “winning” a race where every car goes the same speed was mostly a matter of luck, so he proved his superiority by first “saving” his car on potential wrecks and then demonstrating others couldn't (he nudged Matt Kenseth into a wreck that might have killed him if he weren;t lucky!)
Stewart used his handling and aggressiveness as a means of saying, “I'm better than Kenseth even if this race cannot prove it” in a way that Bonds decided to juice up so as to say, “I know I'm a better player than McGwire, and if he's going to upset that order by using steroids, I'll use steroids better than him.”
Good article and discussion!
On a completely unrelated note, let me take a brief moment to shamelessly promote…er….invite everyone to my free Yahoo! fantasy baseball league being held 10 PM ET (7 PM PT) this Saturday night (3/11). It's a deep league (15 batters, 10 pitchers) so if you know your baseball, come on in!
Yahoo! league ID: 222846
Password: royals