THIS is the Article I Wish I’d Written on Barry Bonds
Chuck Klosterman takes this out of the park like a hanging curve ball:
Here’s an excerpt:
At some point in the immediate to near future, someone is going to throw Barry Bonds a strike when he should be seeing a ball, and he will rake it with extreme prejudice. His propulsive, compact swing will rock the sphere toward the roof of the troposphere; it will fall to earth roughly 440 feet from where Bonds is standing, and he will react as if he is: (a) unimpressed or (b) vaguely annoyed.
He will then jog 360 feet, and some people will cheer, and some people will have mixed feelings, and some people will have mixed feelings while they cheer. And that is because this particular raking will be the 715th home run of Bonds’ career, meaning he will have surpassed the home run production of George Herman “Babe” Ruth…
It’s hard to feel good about that. Bonds is a self-absorbed, unlikable person who has an adversarial relationship with the world at large, and he has (almost certainly) used unethical, unnatural means to accomplish feats that actively hurt baseball. His statistical destruction of Ruth is metaphoric, but not in a good way…
Bonds probably doesn’t care about any of this, and I’m not necessarily certain he should. But the rest of us are left in a curious quandary: How do we reconcile a massive, momentous achievement that is neither wholly real nor socially good?
Yeah…my sentiments pretty much exactly. Great article. I’m a guy who generally roots for every record there is to be broken. I’m excited to see history being made. It’s fun; it’s cool; it’s part of the joy of sports. I was 13 years of age when Hank Aaron took Al Downing deep into the Braves’ bullpen; I was watching it live on TV; I went absolutely bonkers. I can’t think of a single record, broken in my lifetime, that I wasn’t excited to see happen. We love to see excellence and achievement, and to some degree, we can tolerate jerks breaking those records. Pete Rose? A relatively crummy human being, from all indications. Did hit #4192 fill me with excitement? Sure did. I’ve cheered for record-setting athletes of all types, from good guys like Cal Ripken, Nolan Ryan, Jerry Rice, Wayne Gretzky, Michael Jordan, Tiger Woods, and Peyton Manning, to not-so-good guys like Rickey Henderson and Lance Armstrong (Inspiring? Of course. Good guy? Uh, no.).
But not so with the home run records—and yes, I said “records”, indicating plural. Contrary to Klosterman’s piece (I guess I do disagree with it at points), I did not cheer Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa as they made a farce of baseball history, though I guess I was more ambivalent than disgusted. But “disgusted” is exactly what I feel as I contemplate Barry Bonds passing Babe Ruth, and then, horror of horrors, possibly passing Hank Aaron. It thoroughly disgusts me; it makes me feel violated and icky as a (well, former) baseball fan, to even think of Barry Bonds passing the Babe. Bonds has replaced George Steinbrenner and Bud Selig in my mind as the poster child for everything that is wrong with the game of baseball; he epitomizes my contempt for what the game has become.
I don’t hate Barry Bonds, not by any means. Frankly, I feel sorry for a giant of a man like himself who does what he does. But I detest what he (and others, of course) has done to the game of baseball. It used to be a lot of fun.
This phrase comes from the 1978 "Jonestown massacre" in which most members of the Peoples Temple cult, blindly following their leader Jim Jones, committed suicide by drinking cyanide-laced Kool-Aid.
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