Me Thinks the Lady Doth Booeth too Much

Barry Bonds and the Giants are coming to our town this week to play the Dodgers and possibly, to make history. There has been a lot of speculation locally as to what sort of protests, if any, will be permissible should Bonds tie or break Hank Aaron’s homerun record at Chaves Ravine. Arguably, Barry Bonds is booed longer and louder at Dodger Stadium than at any other venue in the country. For Dodger fans he is Darth Vader, Hannibal Lector and Hitler all rolled into one. It is bad enough that he has been a consistent spoiler of outings here, but now he has the opportunity to eclipse a hallowed record held by a down-right likeable guy in our very own house! It will be hard to contain the Blue wrath should this event come to pass. Bud Selig’s best attempts may not be enough to ensure a nice, sanitized bit of video for the Cooperstown vault.

It is a sticky problem with which Major League Baseball now grapples; one of the most reviled figures in sports is now poised to achieve one of the game’s most celebrated milestones and doing so under the most questionable of circumstances. It’s enough to give a commissioner a nasty fit of the vapors. However, in all fairness, the problem is not Barry Bonds at all. Barry Bonds is merely a symptom.

Way back in the nineties when Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa were racking up long balls like the Kennedys rack up grave plots, there was a lot of talk about the balls being “juiced.” The only conceivable reason for this amazing spike on power had to be a change in the equipment, right? Well, as we now know, it wasn’t the balls that were being juiced… it was the owners. Turns out this new homerun derby provided a nice shot of good ‘old American dollars to their fat, white asses... and my, how quickly a Jones develops.

So, it fell to uber-lackey Bud Selig to helm the official Lookin’ the Other Way program while seats filled and we slack-jawed suckers gaped and gawked and just couldn’t get over how fortunate we were to be witnessing such a spectacular show of athletic skill in our lifetime. Gee, didn’t we all just adore that classy-guy Mark McGwire (and wow, was there was a whole lot more classy-guy on his frame now than when he played on the Olympic team!) Too bad that big, bad cheater-pants Barry Bonds had to come and spoil the party.

When it was rosy-cheeked Mark McGwire striding around the base-paths on oak-trunk thighs it really didn’t matter what was behind such a phenomenal performance. It was a nice story and nice stories justify their own means. Now we have a blue-ribbon crap-noggin’ knocking ‘em out and well, we find that it rather sucks. So we moan and complain. Poor us! What did we, the fans, ever do to deserve this? What indeed.

Poor, poor us.