Barry Bonds: Dreamcrusher

When I was about 10 or so years old, I was a member of Foster City Little League. I was on the Cardinals; a AAA team with my newfound friend, Trevor. The league held a contest, as they did in other years, to sell tickets to a San Francisco Giants game. The league got a portion of the ticket sales, and the Giants kicked in prizes for the highest sellers. Trevor and I pooled our collective sales and won that contest by selling 125 tickets to that game; pretty remarkable when I look back on it, but really most of the credit goes to my parents. We each won a bat autographed by Shawn Dunston and, along with the eight other highest selling kids, got to go down to the field before a Giants game to get autographs during batting practice.

I had a blast. Each of the players that took practice graciously came over and signed autographs for us and took pictures. I remember kids yelling out the name of each player that came over to talk to us, and I remember Stan Javier giving me the bat he cracked during practice (what a nice guy; I still have that bat, Stan.) I remember one other thing from that day; Barry Bonds dodging us. While we were getting the autograph of the aforementioned Shawn Dunston, Bonds snuck in behind us, into the locker room, to continue his pregame. In the video of that day that my Mom took, you could actually see Bonds sneaking in behind us, and me catching a quick glimpse of it. I look back on that now and try to think of what was going through his head; I guess he didn't want to deal with the kids that day. It was a pretty jerkish move, for sure.

That said, I think a lot of people take this sort of stuff into account when evaluating players like Barry Bonds athletic ability. Barry will be coming up for Hall of Fame Eligiblity soon enough, and he almost certainly won't get in now, and quite possibly ever. There's a fair case against him that he did steroids, and I can at least buy the argument for that. Unfortunately, though, I think the fact that Barry Bonds was not a real likable guy clouds people's judgment. The thought that Barry Bonds is not one of the greatest players of all time is patently ridiculous; he's verifiably the greatest hitter of all time, and only the second best player of all time because Babe Ruth was also an above average pitcher for half of his career.

This isn't a quality exclusive to Barry Bonds; I hear people talk about other athletes the same way. So and So is holding back the team because he doesn't have a winner's heart, etc. You might also hear them called a Clubhouse Cancer. The idea is that their jerkishness outweighs their ability to put runs on the scoreboard, or whatever the applicable stat is for said sport. I find it really hard to believe that someone could be a big enough jerk to make the greatest hitter of all time not valuable to a team.

What this boils down to, for me, is that athletes shouldn't be role models. We need to stop looking up to professional athletes as anything but excellent physical specimens when they don't care to be anything more than that. Some athletes do try to be more than just athletes, and in such cases, awesome. Many athletes, though, such as Bonds, just want to be awesome baseball players. I think that's just fine. We even have an awards show and museum dedicated to such players. The idea that people think he should be kept out of such a museum because he was a jerk seems pretty irrelevant, and this is coming from a guy who basically had his dreams crushed by Bonds.

Any professional writers that have a hall of fame vote out there? Vote Bonds. I don't like the guy from the one encounter I had, but he's too good of a baseball player to not be in the Hall of Good Baseball Players. We don't even need an asterisk or any such nonsense; everyone knows that Barry Bonds played in the steroids era, and if you think he did steroids, then you don't need an asterisk to tell you that. Heck, vote McGuire, Palmeiro, Rose, Jackson, and just about anyone else who is being barred for such things. We need to take the era for what it is. Plaques of players from 1890 don't have asterisks for dead balls, lack of black opposition, or anything else. We don't need this arbitrary steroid talk keeping these great ballplayers from earning their due respect.