Tarvar is on a roll…
I love The Onion, the satirical online newspaper. It’s funny, witty, and well written. More than anything, I love how they use satire to report the truth… for example, Barry Bonds.
The gist of this recent article is how anyone who’s ever watched baseball in the past five years has known Bonds has been taking steroids. They make fun of the fact that his steroid use was an open secret. With the publication of the book “Game of Shadows” this issue will now be taken seriously. The question is, taken seriously by whom. The article also correctly captures just what a weak-willed, mealy-mouthed, pusillanimous worm of an MLB Commissioner Bud Selig truly is.
What the article doesn’t discuss is what should happen to Barry Bonds. Frankly, I think fans should shun him, I think his team, the San Francisco Giants, should distance themselves from him, his fellow players should condemn his actions, ESPN should cancel that reality show about him they are planning, if he happens to break Babe Ruth’s home run record and then Henry Aaron’s, MLB should ignore that fact, the press should make no mention of it. To some this might sound harsh, but Bonds has become such a stain on the game it’s hard for me to see how anything less would be justified. He’s arrogant and unrepentant and his steroid use is all but an admission that he needed an unfair advantage to accomplish what he has. This bothers me because the achievements of truly gifted and hard working baseball players — like Ken Griffey, Jr. or Cal Ripkin — seem all but ignored.
If baseball ever wants to regain its reputation, it must appoint a commissioner who comes from the same mold that made Bart Giamatti. He received a lot of scorn for banning Pete Rose from the Hall of Fame, especially in Cincinnati. What people seem to miss, however, is the fact that Giamatti loved the simplicity and purity of baseball. He viewed himself as a defender of all that made the game great, and he would not allow players or owners to tarnish that greatness. He may have taken unpopular stands, but it was all for the love of the game, and I respect that.