The Daily News
January 11, 2007
Barry Bonds is the face of baseball starting today.
Before we get anywhere near pitchers and catchers in baseball, we start things off with McGwire and Bonds.
Oh, sure. A new baseball season, the home run season of Barry Bonds, starts right here and now, with a story in the Daily News this morning about Bonds testing positive for amphetamines last season.
Under the sport's collective bargaining agreement, which can occasionally be more fun and full of thrills than Great Adventure, amphetamines are now banned in baseball. You get suspended if you get caught using them. Just not the first time you get caught. According to our sources, and they're good ones, Bonds got caught, then apparently blamed his positive test on teammate Mark Sweeney, apparently because Sweeney was handy.
Bonds has always been great at baseball and lousy at so many other things. Now put lousy teammate in there, too.
If he didn't have Sweeney to blame, maybe he would have blamed the feds, or the media, or an ex-girlfriend, or Mark Fainaru-Wada and Lance Williams, who called him out in "Game of Shadows." All the good parts of his career, a career that has him on the verge of breaking Henry Aaron's all-time home run record, Bonds did. Well him and God, if you believe his version of things. In no particular order.
The bad parts, all these drug allegations that have chased him out of the BALCO case and will chase him right to Aaron, are just examples of how people don't like him and don't want him to break Aaron's record and are out to get him. Just ask Bonds. Or his peeps.
Mark McGwire, who was not elected to the National Baseball Hall of Fame two days ago because people who cheered him for his own home run summer with Sammy Sosa nearly nine years ago now vote against him, is not the main event when it comes to drugs and baseball. He never will be. McGwire was just the headliner for a couple of days because he didn't make it to Cooperstown and Cal Ripken and Tony Gwynn did.
But only for a couple of days. Bonds, it turns out, was on deck, even if it's for a misdemeanor this time and not a felony.
So he is the headliner, today, and in spring training, and with every home run he hits until he gets to 756. He will deny these new allegations the way he denies everything else, and he and his lawyers will say that this is just part of the witch hunt that has been going on for years. They will try to make Bonds some kind of victim again. Fat chance. Believe the story.
He is the face of baseball for as long as he plays, until he finally limps away for good. The Giants, who are in the business of making money and selling tickets and justifying the $126 million they just spent for Barry Zito, are so offended by all the charges that have been made against Bonds that they are in the process of working out a $20million deal for him to continue to play baseball for them. The churchgoers in the organization light candles hoping that Bonds closes in on Aaron and then breaks the record during a long home stand.
Of course this story - Bonds on greenies! - seems like a misdemeanor after everything we have seen from him and everything we have learned from him the last couple of years. Once it wouldn't have even seemed like big news, an aging ballplayer trying to get himself through the long season with something stronger than the special players' pot of coffee that was a clubhouse staple for years and years.
It just happens that taking amphetamines, even if you do get a pass the first time, now happens to be against baseball law. But, then, why would that be anything more than a speed bump with Barry Bonds? If they haven't gotten him yet on steroids - despite a pile of evidence as big and muscle-bound as he has become - why would he think they'd get him on the modern version of pep pills?
McGwire took the fall for everybody this week, and will continue to take it until the next big slugger from the steroid era comes up for a Hall of Fame vote. We know a lot more about steroids than we did when he got to 70 home runs, know that there was a lot more going on than one jug of androstenedione in his locker at Shea Stadium. McGwire was the first name to come up, and he got clipped.
But he can't ever be the face of this whole thing for long, no matter how much he got discussed and written up this week, even if he was the first to break Roger Maris' record, even after that sad appearance in front of Congress in March of 2005, as sad as anything you could see in sports.
Bonds is a Face Book of baseball all by himself. He is about to break an even bigger record than Maris', the biggest record in all of sports, become the all-time home run king of baseball. Barry Bonds is the face of baseball starting today, and every day of the season, until he breaks the record or breaks down. We sure are lucky to have him. Play ball. Originally published on January 11, 2007
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