Barry Bonds is the DEVIL!!!

You can write and say whatever you want about Barry Bonds now. He's the new O.J. Simpson, on trial for threatening to murder the legacies of Babe Ruth and Hank Aaron.

Even though it certainly appears Barry juiced on his way to 700 home runs, it doesn't seem fair that he's receiving the same treatment as The Juice.

But, make no mistake, with Barry on the brink of surpassing Ruth, it's time for sportswriters to cash in and crucify Barry for money. Geraldo Rivera must be livid he's a poor writer. Barry-bashing in print will get you the lead on "SportsCenter" and put you on the cover of Sports Illustrated and in ESPN The Magazine.

Two San Francisco sportswriters proved beyond a shadow of a publisher's doubt that Bonds ingested steroids and human growth hormone throughout the late '90s and early in the new millennium. Now, another sports scribe is unveiling his Barry book, and it details the motivation for Barry's love of the juice.

Can you believe this? Barry Bonds used steroids because muscle-bound bombers Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa "saved baseball" by stroking 136 combined homers during a magical 1998 duel.

Not only is Barry a cheat, a boorish ass, a womanizer and a tax evader, he's also capable of being jealous.

Yep, according to writer Jeff Pearlman, Barry told Ken Griffey Jr. and several other unnamed dinner companions that he was joining the baseball arms race and was willing to stick needles in his rear end to do it.

Pearlman, who was not at the alleged dinner as far as we know, quoted Barry's message to Griffey and Co. verbatim:

"You know what? I had a helluva season last year, and nobody gave a crap. Nobody. As much as I've complained about McGwire and Canseco and all of the bull with steroids, I'm tired of fighting it. I turn 35 this year. I've got three or four good seasons left, and I wanna get paid. I'm just gonna start using some hard-core stuff, and hopefully it won't hurt my body. Then I'll get out of the game and be done with it."

Wow. Someone has a photographic memory, or took very detailed notes of a 1998 meeting. Or maybe Pearlman has been sitting on that little nugget for seven years. Whatever the case, it doesn't matter now. You can write or say anything about Bonds. We're 99.99 percent sure he took steroids, and we're 100 percent sure we don't want him to pass Babe Ruth on the home run chart.

Sportswriters and broadcasters want this so bad that some of them are pushing for Bud Selig to suspend Bonds this season. Not only did Bonds cheat -- just like 75 percent of the players, according to Ken Caminiti, a far more credible source than uninvolved sportswriters -- but he was driven by jealousy.

The latter crime is what cracks me up about the latest attack on Bonds.

People are genuinely upset that Bonds grew frustrated with baseball's unwillingness to address the steroid issue and sportswriters' celebration of McGwire's chemically enhanced "magical season" and basically said, "If I can't beat 'em, I might as well join 'em."

If McGwire, Sosa, money-hungry owners and spineless, jersey-chasing, look-the-other-way, hypocritical baseball writers caused Bonds to use steroids, then I feel sorry for Bonds.

He's a victim in all of this, no different than the kids who turn to steroids because they want to be just like Barry Bonds.

During the McGwire-Sosa farce, the media sent the clear message that using steroids was OK. I'll quote Pearlman's book to make my point. Pearlman quoted Jay Canizaro, one of Bonds' teammates in 1999, saying this about Bonds:

"Hell, he took off his shirt the first day and his back just looked like a mountain of acne. Anybody who had any kind of intelligence or street smarts about them knew Barry was using some serious stuff."

And I'm supposed to believe the same thing couldn't be said about McGwire?

Balls were flying out of parks at a record clip, players' biceps and shoulders were expanding at a record clip, and all we heard were a bunch of smoke-screen stories about juiced baseballs and an andro bottle in McGwire's locker.

Gimme a break.

The excerpt from Pearlman's book humanizes Bonds. He's driven by the same emotions as the rest of us. Jealousy is a vice we all carry. It's great that Ken Griffey Jr. didn't succumb to his feelings of jealousy. More power to him.

But there are reasons we establish laws and rules. It's because most of us can't control ourselves without them. If police never handed out speeding tickets, most of us would ignore the signs and drive as fast as we wanted. If there were no penalties for defaulting on a debt, many of us would not pay our bills.

Bonds watched his peers get rewarded for apparently cheating. The whole country saluted McGwire. If baseball purists, the seamheads who allegedly care about the game, called BS on McGwire and Sosa and celebrated Bonds' truly astonishing 400/400 feat, Bonds likely wouldn't be nipping at Ruth's heels today.

But we didn't do that. No one imagined Bonds' challenging Ruth's legacy as the greatest slugger of all time. So now Bonds must be vilified, disgraced and, if we're lucky, run out of baseball. He can't do what Jason Giambi and almost every steroid cheat has done.

Why can't he?

!!!

And what's this, a Jason Whitlock column that doesn't accuse* an entire sports league of being racists? STFU!

* unless you want to take the McGwire and Giambi references and read between the lives, which is probably the smart thing to do.

SCOTTSDALE, Arizona (AP) Barry Bonds, the only player in baseball history alleged to have taken any form of Performance Enhancing Drugs, gave the baseball world a grim forecast of the rest of his season by striking out. Bonds stood powerless as the sixth pitch of his first Spring Training at-bat in 2 seasons nipped the outside corner for a third and final strike.

Home plate umpire Bill Sharpley added "Stee-ike fwee, OAWT" for emphasis.

Despite going 5-6 with 3 singles and 2 homeruns since, this first at-bat shows that being the focus of all the negative attention this offseason has clearly affected his game. And this is only the begginning. Bonds season will be an uphill battle all the way, facing mean-spirited crowds and taunts for the very first time in his career.

...DEVELOPING....

.777 BA / .700 OPB / 1.700 SLG = 2.400 OPS

3 singles, 1 double, 3 homeruns, 1 sac bunt, 2 strikeouts, 0 walks (it's spring training)

"Over the first 13 seasons of his career ... Bonds hit .290 and averaged 32 home runs and 93 RBI. ... But in the six seasons after he began using performance-enhancing drugs -- that is, ... between the ages of 34 and 40 -- Bonds's batting averaged .328, 39, and 105."

See here folks, RBIs are dependent on steroids. This is THE TRUTH.

erm... is that us??

i lurked on ILB during the playoff/series, it was kind of dead here. surprised to see it get this busy in the off-season -- i'm guessing it's cos of fantasy leagues? don't do em myself, figure i'd get too into it.

i've been wanting to ask this, do people get into rotisserie because they're stats heads or do they become stats heads because they're into rotisserie?

Then we paid a stat service in New York where you phoned in transactions by numbers assigned to each player, and they mailed a weekly standings and stats packet to each player.

I don't see much of a correlation between stathead interest and roto interest. On the stat side you've got a lot of people like Morbius who despise it, and roto leagues by their nature (wins, era, saves) don't lend themselves to stat-headism. I'm hoping next year to talk people into changing one of our money leagues to something more stat friendly - OPS, k-rate, etc.., for a change of pace.

Um, I consider myself on the root-root-root-for-the-real-team side. (And many of you have a better idea of what VORP and BABIP mean than I do.) If you look at the Baseball Prospectus site these days, those guys play plenty of roto, and are playing this game for charity:

http://www.scoresheet.com/baseball/index.html

and roto leagues by their nature (wins, era, saves) don't lend themselves to stat-headism.

Unless you change the stats.

Back to Topic Bighead... Jim Baker of BP thinks he's sunk HOFwise; unless PEDs become accepted in the culture. anyone agree?

"What are Bonds' chances at the Hall of Fame? From the sound of things, they're not very good. The general stinginess of the voting committee does not bode well for him and if I were Mark McGwire, I wouldn’t be busting out the scenic New York state tourist brochures anytime soon, either....he is not well-positioned emotionally to rehabilitate his image. He is not the type to cultivate favor among the press. A tear-stained mea culpa is not likely on his agenda. Even if he could conjure such an out of character performance, it is highly unlikely that voters will give him a pass on his transgressions and judge him on the merits of his pre-enhancement days. I think he’s pretty much hosed unless he saves 10 or 20 babies from a burning building at some point in the next few years. Even then, those babies had better be related to men on the voting committee.

Unless…

Things change. A lot.

This is a stretch but there may come a time many decades down the line wherein performance enhancement is no longer a cause celeb. It could be that 30, 40 or 50 years from now researchers will have found a way to artificially improve the human physique and abilities without nasty side effects. These artificial improvements will become commonplace and accepted. In a climate such as that, it could be possible for a Hall of Fame veterans committee to look back at what Bonds did and either wonder what all the fuss was about or, stranger still, see him as some sort of pioneer in the proper method for artificial self-improvement. It’s not the sort of future I would endorse, but, given the great strides made in that direction so far, it is one that is certainly possible."

The lawsuit is built around California's Unfair Competition Law, Business and Professions Code section 17200, that states if one person is able to market something by committing an unlawful act, it puts others who act lawfully at an unfair disadvantage.

http://sports.yahoo.com/mlb/news?slug=ap-bonds-homelessaunt&prov=ap&type=lgns

1) i had no idea he only needed 47 HRs to tie when i made that prediction upthread

2) viewing ESPN's Bonds on Bonds right now. he's not exactly coming across as humble. anyone else watching?

I only caught the last 15 mins or so, complete w/ "I don't give a shit" sobbing. For a BB propaganda show, this martyr stuff is not a wise angle. (People kvetching over ESPN like it's a news organization make me laugh, tho.)

>>But baseball is still the intellectual game; it's the game most compelling to the likes of Ken Burns and George Will and Yo La Tengo>Baseball is the only sport where numbers always seem meaningful, and it's the only sport where a numeric comparison between players of different eras is even halfway reasonable.

I don't have the stat handy but Barry has hit more homeruns off more pitchers than anyone in history by a large margin. This isn't the Babe Ruth days...

As far as the DH thing goes, Bonds is the Giants only marquee player. until last year, he was perpetually healthy and the best player in baseball. So the Giants signed him to a long-term contract. That contract backfired in 2005, and in 2006 he has been a liability SO FAR. But

(1) would the Giants trade their main draw in a trade that couldn't possibly yield any real value
(2) would anyone want a gimpy dh who will probably be booed by the home fans and makes $20mil per year?
(3) would bonds accept the trade, given that the yankees, sox, a's, tribe and chisox have a dh already, and that the remainder of the contenders can't afford him? that leaves a bunch of teams that bonds probably wouldn't accept a trade to, being a 10-5 guy.

dude, bernie williams...

Bonds changes his mind on this stuff every week. His knee must feel like shit this week. Next week if it's feeling better and he hits a couple of dingers he'll say he'll play until he passes Aaron or drops dead, whichever comes first. This honestly wouldn't surprise me.

i don't think he's gonna pass aaron, though.

Bernie hasn't DHed for the Bombers in approximately two weeks, and to my knowledge the Yankees don't plan to put him back in there, and Giambi is effectively the DH at this point. I could be wrong, but hey.