Barry Bonds Lives On...

[pemoco]

Should be an interesting year as one of the great records of baseball is threatened by one of the game's most controversial figures.

I expect the usual vacuum of leadership from the Commissioner on this.

[philinla]

yup, it'sa shame, he was a great player before he ever started messing with PED's.

[sinctybldh]

Its going to be a huge stain on the record books.

[pemoco]

This is a little dated but worth posting anyway:

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Waffling Selig fuels doubts about Bonds
Scott Ostler

Sunday, February 18, 2007

Baseball has a problem: Not enough straight talk, starting at the top.

Bud Selig says he's not sure if he'll be on hand to celebrate Barry Bonds breaking Hank Aaron's home-run record. Because ...

Someone else might be breaking one of baseball's most hallowed records at the exact same time and Selig wouldn't want to hurt anyone's feelings?

If Bonds breaks the record in 2012, Selig might be retired?

The great event might conflict with Bud's bowling night?

Selig doesn't give a reason for not giving a reason.

What he does say is that if there is "one scintilla" of doubt that a game of baseball might be affected by players doing "some things they're not supposed to do," baseball is in deep trouble.

Does Selig read the newspapers? Books?

What the commissioner of baseball should say about Bonds and the home-run record is one of two things:

Either, "Of course I will be at the ballpark when Barry Bonds passes Hank Aaron. Are you kidding? I'm the commissioner!"

Or, "No can do. Cream, clear, Greg Anderson, Mark Sweeney, leaked testimony, yadda-yadda."

If Selig chooses option A, he can always change his mind if more evidence surfaces.

But waffling, declining to RSVP for the Bonds Bash, leaves a scintilla of doubt about the commissioner of the baseball having a scintilla of doubt about the integrity of the home-run record.

Bonds inspires a lot of double talk. Felipe Alou kind of danced around some of the Barry issues, with Bonds and with the general public. Bruce Bochy has a chance to get off on the right foot.

He can explain to Bonds, and the fans (through the media) that he (Bochy) expects every player to be available, every inning, unless other arrangements have been made. Otherwise the manager looks silly, and managers hate it when that happens.

Bochy can also let it be known that he expects every player to keep him up to speed on the player's status vis a vis injuries, fatigue and naps, and that Bochy won't be seeking that info via Web sites.

And while he's at it, Bochy can announce that the bullpen closer job is up for grabs.

That would be scintilla-ating.

www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/02/18/SPGL7O63ET1.DTL

[David Goodman]

I have no interest in the Bonds story.

[pemoco]

admin said:

I have no interest in the Bonds story.

so you won't be posting on this thread again?

[pemoco]

April 4, 2007
Sports of The Times
It May Not Be a Pitch That Stops Bonds Short
By SELENA ROBERTS
SAN FRANCISCO

In a game of “I Spy Barry Bonds,” did you see a cheat or a victim casting muscular shadows in the sun during the Giants season opener yesterday? Did you groan when Bonds walked in the fourth or cheer when he finished without a homer?

Whatever you felt, remember the feds have emotions, too.

By inching no closer in his pursuit of Hank Aaron’s No. 755, by remaining 22 home runs behind history, Bonds simply delayed the inevitable — not the sexy record, but his own indictment.

However you keep stats, remember the feds have home-run tickers, too.

There is conceivably a point this summer — with Bonds at No. 748 or No. 752 — when federal prosecutors could decide to play legacy interruptus. There may be a convenient time this summer — with Greg Anderson still lip-sealed in prison — when the Balco sleuths could ride into the season and play baseball saviors by handing down an indictment of Bonds.

“I think the lead investigator has been fixated with taking Barry down,” Bonds’s lawyer, Michael Rains, said yesterday in a telephone interview, referring to special agent Jeff Novitzky. “I think he is so fixated on Barry getting the record that he would want to take him out first.”

Rains is unbridled at presenting theories as distractions around the Bonds case, but it is not difficult to imagine one government agent’s agenda pushing forward considering the political chaos surrounding the United States attorney’s office.

“It’s not a healthy motivation,” Rains said. “It’s an improper motivation. I think it would be transparent. But in some cases, I don’t think the government cares if its arrogance is transparent.” That’s funny. Neither does Bonds. He is an unabashed narcissist with AT&T Park as his reflecting pond. In the stands, Bonds sees nothing but adoration when he looks at Giants fans who will drive a Prius, shop at Whole Foods, but hug the tree trunk of an inorganic, aloof superstar.

Bonds left after the Giants’ 7-0 loss to the Padres without comment. Somehow, Giants devotees are inured to his silence. Somehow, Bonds commands unconditional love, hopeless devotion, from those near and far.

The common room inside the federal correctional facility across the San Francisco Bay in Dublin, Calif., has a garden-variety television, with the channel selected by inmate consensus, the prison official Sally Swarts said yesterday.

Inmates might well have tuned in to the Giants’ opener. And Anderson might well have been viewing, too, as he spent yet another day of another month behind razor wire for the love of Bonds. Or is Bonds’s loyal trainer selling his freedom for an eventual payback?

Anderson is being held for contempt of court, unwilling to potentially out Bonds for declaring flaxseed oil as his secret power potion when it was only a beard to his steroid use. Anderson is the code-breaker for prosecutors, the snitch who could decode seized calendars. He is the key to an indictment of Bonds amid the feds’ sport of perjury gotcha.

Bonds owes Anderson. And yet everyone from Gary Sheffield to former business associates to charity organizers would cast Bonds as Mr. Potter of Pottersville. Rains referred to Bonds as prudent. Everyone else calls him cheap.

In his grand jury testimony reported by The San Francisco Chronicle, Bonds said, “Greg has nothing. Guy lives in his car half the time.”

Bonds never felt rich-man’s guilt for his buddy. Not then. So why now?

“If you know anything about Barry’s relationship with Greg, he paid him a terrible pittance,” Rains said. “I’m his lawyer, and I’m telling you, I think Barry should have paid Greg a hell of a lot more money.

“If Greg was into the big payday, he’d have a book deal in the works.”

Anderson isn’t talking to anyone, not the news media, not the feds, not a ghost writer. There appears to be no breaking point for Anderson. An indictment of Bonds without Anderson’s help may, as Rains said, “prove the imprisonment of Greg was a harassment tactic.”

An indictment may also mean Anderson’s release. But this is not how Anderson would have wanted his freedom. He has kept his mouth shut and remained behind bars on a sacrifice to protect Bonds. If Anderson didn’t talk, he has reasoned, Bonds could continue his march toward Aaron. The feds could ruin that plan if they step in and stop Bonds’s chase short of No. 755.

“I wouldn’t be shocked if they made a move like that,” Rains said.

In the world of Balco, nothing is unexpected. Bonds elicits so many emotions — from joy to anger to stubborn indifference — it wouldn’t be surprising for the feds to be following their own home run ticker.

•

In the eighth inning, Bonds lifted a deep fly ball to the warning track in left field. It was caught. With the game against the Padres long out of reach, the Giants’ fans dispersed disappointed in Bonds’s homerless day.

Their devotion to Bonds — like Anderson’s — is unclouded. But when it comes to the matter of Bonds versus Balco, it’s more complicated: Do you pull for the self-consumed Bonds or the hubristic feds?

Amid all the untidiness of the Bonds pursuit, the answer is simple: You have to pull for Hank Aaron. Baseball doesn’t deserve to be saved by the feds after years of owner denial and union obstruction over steroid use in their sport, but Aaron does.

Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company

[kinger]

Suprised to see Barry steal second yesterday. I guess the legs are much better this year which will help him in his pursuit of the record.

[pemoco]

Aaron doesn't plan to celebrate with Bonds
/ Associated Press


ATLANTA (AP) - Hank Aaron doesn't plan to be at the ballpark if and when Barry Bonds breaks his home run record.

"Uh-uh. No, no. I'm not going to be around," Aaron was quoted as saying in Tuesday's editions of The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

Bonds has 735 homers, 20 short of Aaron's career record. While Aaron has declined most interview requests in recent months, he spoke with Journal-Constitution columnist Terence Moore.

Aaron said he wouldn't attend if Bonds were within reach of the record when the San Francisco Giants play at Atlanta from Aug. 14-16.

"I'd probably fly to West Palm Beach to play golf," Aaron was quoted as saying in Moore's column. "Again, it has nothing to do with anybody, other than I had enough of it. I don't want to be around that sort of thing anymore. I just want to be at peace with myself. I don't want to answer questions. It's going to be a no-win situation for me anyway. If I go, people are going to say, 'Well, he went because of this.' If I don't go, they'll say whatever. I'll just let them make their own mind up."

Aaron, who did not return a call from The Associated Press, said baseball commissioner Bud Selig has told him that Bonds has asked several times why Aaron hasn't contacted him as he approaches the record.

"I don't talk to anybody, really, and I've never talked to Barry, outside of that commercial we did together a few years ago, and a few other short times," Aaron was quoted as saying. "I'm 72 years old, and I'm not hopping on a plane and flying all the way to San Francisco for anybody."

[pemoco]

Phil Sheridan | Bonds is just product of times
The steroid stain goes beyond him.
By Phil Sheridan
Inquirer Columnist


As the San Francisco Giants' Barry Bonds closes in on Henry Aaron's home-run record, the doping scandal casts doubts across baseball that cry out for a thorough disclosure of all names and findings.

We need the names. As many as possible.
When investigators bust a steroid-distribution operation in Florida, we need to know the names of the professional athletes on the mailing list.

When the feds flip a former Mets clubhouse guy with a booming steroid and human-growth-hormone business, we need to know the redacted names in the court documents.

When former Sen. George Mitchell starts interviewing active players in his so-far unproductive official inquiry into cheating in baseball, we need to know who they are and why they were selected.

We need the names. As soon as possible.

The "we" here isn't just the media who write about major-league baseball and the NFL and other sports tainted by the specter of widespread cheating. The "we" means the fans, it means the administrators who run the sports, and yes, it even means the current and future players who may be tempted to start cheating.

Much is happening in the biggest ongoing story in sports - the painstaking, gradual exposure of the cheating epidemic - as the focus has switched from easily fooled and sloppily applied urine testing to serious criminal-investigation techniques. Paper trails and stool pigeons are going to catch more cheaters than MLB or the NFL ever did, possibly because MLB and the NFL weren't always trying very hard.

Meanwhile, as affidavits are taken and endorsed checks are recovered, a 42-year-old player named Barry Bonds continues his inexorable drive to baseball's all-time home-run record.

Has there ever been a more sublimely absurd set of circumstances in the history of sports? Joe DiMaggio hit in 56 consecutive games and Pete Rose stalked Ty Cobb and Michael Jordan and Wayne Gretzky rewrote their sports' record books. That's the level of achievement we're talking about here, but has anyone ever attempted something this audacious with so much public doubt about its integrity?

Bonds was at 744, 11 shy of Henry Aaron's 755, going into last night's game. His personal trainer, Balco-connected Greg Anderson, was sitting in a jail cell because he won't testify against Bonds. Can this really be happening?

The crazy part is, the more we learn, the better Bonds looks.

Let's take this latest case. Kirk Radomski spent 11 years working in the visitors' clubhouse at Shea Stadium, picking up used towels and running errands for players. Beginning in 1995, he distributed steroids, HGH, and other performance-enhancing drugs, he said in testimony, according to a plea agreement he made with the federal government. Radomski named dozens of players, and investigators have his billing and payment records.

As suspected when the case broke, Balco was the merest tip of an iceberg that seems bigger every time we get another glimpse of it. The more we see, the more Bonds looks like one of a very large group rather than some brazen cheater.

There are two reasons Bonds has drawn so much attention and criticism: timing and the Aaron record. If Balco had been exposed five years after Bonds hit No. 756, it would have been big news. If he'd faded away with injuries the last few years, leaving Aaron's record intact, there would still be debate about the integrity of his career numbers.

But in either of those cases, Bonds would not be wearing quite the same bull's-eye as he wears right now. It is the combination - knowing he admitted to using Balco products as he slugs his way toward Aaron - that creates all this heat.

Unfortunately, according to disturbing poll results released the other day by ESPN and ABC News, many African Americans believe race is the primary reason Bonds is so reviled. That is discouraging, and it is one more reason we need as many names, as soon as possible, from the various investigations.

It is a sad fact of life that there are people out there who dislike Bonds for racial reasons. Others dislike Bonds because he is just not that pleasant a guy. But he is at the center of this mess because he put himself there, and because he is about to break perhaps the most significant record in sports.

That record is so significant at least partly because it was set by an African American, Aaron, who had to overcome virulent racism while he passed Babe Ruth.

It is telling that Aaron, one of the great sports heroes in this country's history, was present for Jackie Robinson Day at Dodger Stadium last month but has said he will not be there when Bonds breaks his record.

No words could be more eloquent.

Bonds' achievement will be tainted, no doubt about that. But it is becoming clearer all the time that all of baseball was tainted during the era that just passed. Bonds' record may be a product of a lab, but he's a product of his time.

[pemoco]

Bill Dwyre:
Message to Selig on Bonds' 756th: Don't go there
Baseball commissioner would be doing his sport a favor if he did the politically incorrect thing and didn't show up when the home run record is broken.
May 12, 2007


Bud Selig has a mess on his hands and we're here to help.

This is not something simple, like an All-Star game in your hometown, where the teams run out of pitchers after the 11th inning and you can just call it off. A few boos, a couple of days of talk show guys and sarcastic newspaper columnists smacking you down and it is over.

No, this is about Barry Bonds. The king of swing. The one major league baseball player who could put a giant "S" on his jersey and the second thing you'd think it stood for was "Superman."

Bonds is 11 home runs away from breaking one of the most revered of all sports records, Hank Aaron's 755 in a career. Selig is the commissioner of baseball.

Normally, this would be a joyous time for both. Bonds could take that last swing and Selig could be there, standing at home plate as Bonds arrives, representing all of baseball in this glorious, historic moment.

There would be smiles and high-fives and hugs and music and fireworks and the play-by-play guys ad-libbing their rehearsed excitement. Selig could have the gates opened and Bonds' new Mercedes, a gift from MLB, driven right onto the field. All the fans would be standing and applauding, except for the local IRS agent, who would be chasing the guy who caught the home run ball.

Sadly, it probably won't be exactly like that. There is a cliché for situations like this. Selig is between a rock and a hard place.

There is much more to anguish over here than the current outcry over beer in the clubhouses. Was Josh Hancock's death a wake-up call for MLB to ban beer in the players' quarters? Is it time to react, rush to a ruling and return prohibition to baseball?

Or do you heed veterans such as Angels General Manager Bill Stoneman and Manager Mike Scioscia, who each said this week that beer in the clubhouse had never been a problem and was potentially even less so now because players don't hang around much anymore. They can find better places than a team clubhouse to get smashed and then get smashed.

Selig is pretty good at stuff like that. He will let it quiet down and go away on its own. Some of his best decisions are the ones he doesn't make.

Then there is the ruffle over the return of Roger (the early-season dodger) Clemens, who likes to give whichever team has the biggest Brink's truck at least four good months, sometimes five. There is a swell of opinion by baseball fans and Yankees haters — one and the same west of Times Square — that Selig should make some rule preventing guys from walking off the golf course May 15 and getting the key to Ft. Knox.

The whining is especially loud from Red Sox fans who, we must recognize, are only doing what they do best.

Again, Selig shrugs off this stuff. He knows that Roger the dodger is on the verge of becoming Roger the codger and that eight or nine losses and a 6.20 earned-run average will fix this forever.

The Bonds thing is bigger, and certainly not ignore-able. The clock is ticking. Eleven swings and the Sultan of Swabs will have finally out-hammered Hank.

We don't want to be so presumptuous as to tell Selig what to do, even though we've been doing that for more than 35 years, going back to newspaper days in Milwaukee. We were always there for him, advising him, as then-owner of the Milwaukee Brewers, on things such as player assessment. For example, early on, we told him those new kids, Paul Molitor and Robin Yount, would never amount to anything.

This Bonds thing is big, though. Selig deserves our unbiased, objective assessment.

If Selig shows up and celebrates a crowning of one of the least popular, most-suspected-of-enhancing-his-performance players of all-time, he could end up looking like a fraud and phony down the road.

That would happen if the Mitchell Commission, hired and paid for by baseball — a.k.a. Selig — to investigate the use of performance-enhancing drugs in his sport, had Barry Bonds' name in its report. It is correct that nothing has ever been proved about Bonds and drugs. There is also a saying that where there is smoke, there is fire.

If Selig doesn't show, he will incur the wrath of several thousand San Francisco Giants fans and the admiration of the rest of Western civilization. Twenty-nine MLB owners will swap high-fives. The owner in San Francisco will pound on the table and hold his breath until he turns blue, then cream-colored.

There they are, Bud. Choices. Options. One coin, two sides.

You can either put on your holster and walk, like John Wayne, to the middle of the street and say, real slowly, "I'm tellin' all of ya right now, I'm stayin' home and cleanin' my gun."

Or, you can make a wimpy, politically correct call, one that'll get you praised on "Oprah" and patted on the back at the convention of the Sons and Daughters of American Quilt Makers.

Whatever you do, Bud, we're with you.

Unless you get it wrong.

*