"Barry Bonds is My Favorite Player"

This is a response to the Bonds post from my buddy Joel. He and I have had a long history of baseball debates.

In fact, we were trying to settle an argument about Rogers Hornsby one night and decided that we'd look on the Internet to determine who was right. This was in 1998 (or possibly earlier), so the Internet was still in its early stages and we were using dial-up. Just to give perspective.

We went to mlb.com and found that it was a site for a law firm called Miller, Lauman, and Brohm. There was a link at the bottom that said, "Looking for Major League Baseball? Click here." At that point, we weren't as concerned with Hornsby anymore as we were with the fact that someone in the marketing department really dropped the ball. Later, we found the answer on majorleaguebaseball.com.

But not before we sent this to Miller, Lauman, and Brohm through their "Contact Us" submission form (which seemed really high-tech at the time):

"Hi. We don't need any legal services, but we had a question. Do you know what Rogers Hornsby batted in 1925? Thanks. It's a biggie."

I realize that this long-winded story is delaying your enjoyment of his response, but I just wanted to let you know where he's coming from...

Basically it's not real to me, the Bonds thing . That's true for a number of reasons. First of all I'm a manic reader about Baseball's Past. I love baseball and I love history, so baseball history, as you might expect, holds a very very special place in my heart.

I was reading The Boys of Summer earlier this year, which is about the ' 52 and '53 Brooklyn Dodgers. That story , to me, is real. It's all in books I've read. To me, the top (career) five home run hitters are Aaron, Ruth, Mays, Frank Robinson and (I think) Reggie. It's weird and unfitting that in my lifetime (in the last decade, actually) there have been SEVERAL changes to that list.

It's an odd kind of self-hate that for me, the men of today will never equal those from years gone by. And I can prove it, numerically. I think. That's the beautiful thing about baseball--it will torment you to death with that question "who was best, when," because the nature of the stats make different eras look so seductively comparable.

We know that Ben Roethlisberger, a middle-of-the-pack to lower-tier-great quarterback of today, would swat Bart Starr, one of the two or three best when he played, like a fly . Physically they're practically from different species. Football and basketball are each clearly incomparable sports, historically speaking. Obviously Jim Brown would kill whenever, but apart from him and a few other guys, you can't begin to line up the players of yesterday alongside those of today.

The quality of baseball that I believe makes it the most lovable and poetic is that it's a series of individual confrontations. The ability to stick the tallest or fattest five guys you can find on the field has no appreciable advantage . On top of that, or because of it, it is able to be defined statistically the best of all sports and then we can't help but line these statistics up.

The ability to hit or pitch or field or throw has always probably been fairly consistent , right? But unfortunately there are such stark differences between eras that we know that we're just kidding ourselves.

The balls were mush.
Only white men could play.
The fields were enormous.
PEOPLE DIDN'T USE GLOVES.

Different styles of play were in vogue at different times. Mound height and strike zone size varied.

Basically you can't compare eras in an intellectually honest fashion. Not that well. Of course in spite of this we will continue to try and baseball's records will continue to fall and we'll spend half of our energy comparing the magnitude of the newest feat with its predecessor and the other half deriding its historical value. We can't help it, we purists.

All of that said--Bonds is a magnificent athlete and an all-time player and he's been my favorite since he came up. The fact that he continues to be, or rather that there was never a successor speaks as much to my disaffection and changing relationship with current baseball as I've grown older ('thank yous' go to both Father Time and the Pittsburgh Pirates organization) as to his undeniable continued excellence.

It's always been a matter of pride to me that Bonds was my favorite from Day 1--even when he sucked (brief though that time was). But then he left Pittsburgh and it's never really been the same.

Well, his post-season performance aside-- the Pirates surely haven't been the same. I haven't either. And so now it's so odd, that this far removed from the tucked-away-in-Pittsburgh relationship of me KNOWING that he was great and wishing that the world at large would realize that, he's now great, in fact, the greatest, under the most suspicious of circumstances. Isn't that just the darnedest.

I turned 30 this summer. Barry Bonds broke Hank Aaron's career home run record. I doubt that he cares about the parallel, but for me, this is really about the last vestiges of boyhood dying. The one baseball record I've known and appreciated the longest is broken, by, of all people, my boyhood hero under the most suspicious and tainted and asterisk-ridden of circumstances. If that doesn't grow you up fast, nothing will.

So in a most blatant act of cowardice, I don't care. I just can't. Bonds breaks Aaron's record 30-odd years later in a totally different athletic and moral environment. It'd be like if I wrote a song and somehow, magically, you could definitively say it was "cooler" than "Penny Lane." I mean wouldn't that just be stupid--like this record, no one would believe you.

The game is different. Heck, he's different. Look at the pictures. But because of the nature of baseball, we THINK we can compare and so inevitably we do. And that's why we love it, and perhaps, like all great loves, just the teensiest bit hate it.

So what I'm left with is a retreat. I retreat to the "classics," reading about the 50's Dodgers playing in the ostensible mecca of baseball, and maybe after this, I'll finish that biography of Ted Williams that's hanging around. Maybe I'll dabble some more into Roger Angell's columns about the 60's Mets and Yankees.

I don't have to explain my pursuits to a real baseball person. For us, it's ALL esoteric and arcane effluvia anyways, so who cares about the stigma of digging deeper.

Maybe after that, I'll close my eyes and run down the career home run list. Aaron 755 , Ruth 714, Mays 660, Robinson 586. . . and maybe, JUST maybe , I'll turn on and watch a game. I'll pretend I don't care, can't care, as much as I did back then.

It's the intentional self-delusion that is the most comforting.