Caught a little bit of the first episode of "Bonds on Bonds" the other night, in particular the part where Bad Barry is seen weeping and moaning about how the world is closing in on him and everyone is out to get him. Such compelling, heart-wrenching stuff, it was tough to know whether to cry along with him or merely throw up.
At spring training a couple of weeks earlier,
Jim Leyland, Bonds' first manager in the big leagues with the Pirates in 1986, was saying that this was precisely the way Bonds motivates himself. "Barry needs adversity," said Leyland. "It's what drives him. I never saw a player who could turn adversity and turmoil around him into his advantage the way Barry does."
If that's so, then
Bud Selig should only hope the Bonds who looked so lame and feeble Thursday in his first home game in front of the only adoring crowds he'll see this year was not a mirage. Maybe the steady six-year diet of steroid cocktails and the resultant blown-out knee
have finally reduced him to a carbon copy of his suspected partner in crime,
Sammy Sosa. Because Bonds couldn't have more adversity to thrive off than he has now.
And it figures to get uglier and uglier as the season goes on and the Bonds media circus travels from city to city.
There isn't a more laid-back city in baseball than San Diego and yet in the Giants' first three games of the season there, the surf-and-sushi set turned Petco Park into a cauldron of abuse, taunting Bonds verbally, tossing fake hypodermic needles onto the field, and papering the stands with hundreds of placards bearing such indicting and inciting messages as "Greatest Cheater of the Era" and "Huge Head, Tiny Bat, Tiny Balls." Bet Bonds' Giants teammates can't wait to get to Philadelphia and New York.
If it's any consolation for Bonds in his time of distress, he still has a supporter in Hall of Famer
Mike Schmidt, who's been making the rounds of the talk-show circuit putting the lie to the title of his own recent autobiography "Clearing The Bases: Juiced Players, Monster Salaries, Sham Records and a Hall-of-Famer's search for the Soul of Baseball". In Schmidt's eternal Pollyanna world, Bonds is the greatest hitter who ever lived and players shouldn't be blamed for using steroids to get an advantage. And even if they're found guilty, they still deserve to be put in the Hall of Fame if they have the numbers, just maybe not on the first ballot. Indeed, Schmidt's apologetic pap is even more vomit-inducing than Bonds' self-pitying reality series.
Anyhow, Selig must hope Leyland is wrong and that the intense heat Bonds is getting from the media and the fans, combined with his deteriorated physical condition, will prompt him to take himself out of the game and give up the pursuit of
Hank Aaron's Holy Grail record of 755 homers. In the meantime, there are legitimate concerns about how intense former Senate Majority Leader
George Mitchell's investigation of Bonds and the other steroids cheats will be.
Is Mitchell going to be willing to take the investigation all the way to the prosecutor's level, involving the U.S. Attorney's office? Otherwise, without subpoena power, how does Mitchell expect the sort of full and forthright cooperation he needs to get to the bottom of this scandal? And how should we expect him to interrogate other owners and GMs - or Selig himself - with whom he's formed friendships in recent years?
Once again, the degree of aggressiveness with which Selig's internal security forces have dealt with this crisis came under question again with the unsettling San Francisco Chronicle report last week of a Feb. 2004 letter sent to Selig by
Larry M. Boyle, a Chief U.S. Magistrate Judge in Boise, Idaho. In the letter, Boyle detailed a June 2002 conversation he'd had with Bonds' personal trainer,
Greg Anderson, at the Minneapolis-St.Paul airport. According to Boyle, Anderson, who has since done three months in jail for money laundering and steroid distribution, revealed that he'd been dispatched by Bonds to render his services to
Gary Sheffield (then with the Braves), who was in a batting slump. Boyle felt Selig needed to know about Anderson's travels, but he never got a response. This is all too reminiscent of a Daily News report last March in which special FBI agent
Greg Stejskal was said to have informed MLBchief of security
Kevin Hallinan at an agents convention in Quantico, Va., in September of 1994 about possible widescale steroid use in baseball. Hallinan, who apparently did nothing with the information, adamantly denied having met Stejskal.
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Originally Posted by BoSox34
