I love Barry Bonds. Not as a person, or as a player, but for what he did in the end.
Baseball looked the other way on steroids for more than a decade. Then everyone woke up and realized what had happened, and through the hangover realized that baseball had completely lost its way. And they decided that Barry Bonds was the symbol of everything that was wrong. Old white sportswriters bawled like somebody’d shut down the buffet. Bud Selig suddenly decided he had better things to do than honor the impending accomplishment. Everyone wanted Barry Bonds to pay for the sins of baseball. And Barry refused to play along with it.
Everyone went apeshit for Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa in 1998. Bonds took that record in 2001. Then, in 2007, he took the most hallowed record in baseball away from Hank Aaron. Every one of the aforementioned sports fossils wanted to apply an asterisk to the records – well, the asterisk is there, all right, and it’s on an entire decade of the sport. It’s on Bud Selig, it’s on the players union, it’s on the owners who looked the other way because the balls were flying out of the yard and the cash registers were ringing. Barry Bonds is God’s judgement on baseball – you think this guy’s an asshole, and you want to pin it all on him? He’s going to take your crown jewels and quite literally smash them with a ball bat.
To borrow a line from Battlestar Galactica, the day comes when you can’t hide from the things you’ve done. Baseball got exactly what it deserved. Nobody likes the Angel of Death, but the judgement has to come from somewhere. And that’s why I like #25 – because he was given the role of Angel of Death, and he didn’t shirk from it. He didn’t apologize for it, he didn’t beg forgiveness, he didn’t knuckle under and accept the scorn and abuse from a thousand other guilty consciences. He went out, punched the clock, told the world to go fuck itself, and swung the bat. And I can’t help but respect that.