I’d like to talk about Barry Bonds today. I’d like to talk about Barry Bonds even though the subject is exhausted, is exhausting, to everyone, because I think it’s important to try to understand why it’s preoccupying the culture. It’s important for baseball fans to look at why we feel so strongly about Barry Bonds (or, if we don’t, why we don’t). It’s important for non-baseball fans, too, because the way each of us thinks about baseball is, sometimes, in some ways, the way each of us thinks about ourselves and the way each of us thinks about America.

It’s that kind of bombast that curdles a lot of the coverage of both Bonds and the game in general, trying to turn baseball into a literary referendum on life, so before we all get cavities, let me get into the concretes: nearly as long as I’ve been alive, Hank Aaron has held the all-time home run record. As of April 1974, Hank Aaron had hit more home runs than anyone else, ever, and since then, this has been what is. I became a baseball fan twenty years ago, and when you come to the game, you learn its catechisms of What Is — who hit the most home runs, all-time and in a single season; the last man to hit .400; the most hits, all time and in a single season; all the records and numbers — and when I came to the game, the catechism went like so: Hank Aaron, Roger Maris, Ted Williams, Ty Cobb, George Sisler, and so on.

Then it went like so: Hank Aaron, Roger Maris, Ted Williams, Pete Rose, George Sisler.

Then it went like so: Hank Aaron, Mark McGwire, Ted Williams, Pete Rose, George Sisler.

Now it’s something like: Hank Aaron, Barry Bonds, Ted Williams, Pete Rose, Ichiro!.

When I came to the game, hitting 35 home runs in a season was a big thing. Now, it isn’t. When I came to the game, cracking .300 was an accomplishment. Now, it isn’t. When I came to the game, it was the received wisdom that Roger Maris’s 61 was a fluke, and would never be challenged. Now, it isn’t. Things change.

Things change, and we all know this, but as much as the general population resists and is uncomfortable with change, the average baseball fan is even worse. The designated hitter rule came into effect before I was born; baseball fans still bitch about it. The strike zone changed, like, ten years ago; I still bitch about it. The Dodgers left Brooklyn two generations ago, and there are people who have still not gotten over it and never will, and if you give them even the tiniest opening, these people will bitch about it for an hour without pausing for so much as a sip of beer and then they will spend the next hour trying to convince you that buying a three-inch chunk of Ebbets Field on eBay for four hundred dollars is not crazy. Baseball fans like things to stay the same, because baseball fans love the game for two reasons, in varying proportions: history, and statistics. The sense of grandness, and the sensibility of arithmetic. “Poetry in motion,” and “it works on paper.”

So, when a baseball record of long standing is broken, or is threatened with breakage, many baseball fans immediately just knee-jerk Are Not Having It, no matter what the record is or who’s fixing to break it. Whether it’s a nostalgia issue, where we’ve all gotten accustomed to Maris’s shy-looking, carved-wood sepia face, or a math issue, where we went to the trouble to memorize the numbers and now we have to revise the mnemonic: Not Having It, Sir, And A Very Good Day To You. And the attention paid to Bonds’s pursuit of the home-run record is, in no small part, about people in general and baseball fans in particular just plain old wanting things to stay the same.

Another large part of the reaction to Bonds right now is the fact that he’s chasing the Babe. I have probably read a hundred articles in various papers and sports blogs over the last few weeks which complain that Babe Ruth is not in fact the all-time record holder for home runs anymore, and has not been for thirty years, so why is everyone making such a federal case about 714, and I will tell you why: because it’s the Babe.

It is absolutely annoying that ESPN interrupts coverage of other games for Bonds’s at-bats. It is, I grant you, probably baffling to some people that the passing of a number two on an all-time list is generating so much attention. But it is not baffling to me, because it is the Babe.

The same shit went down in 1961. People gave Maris a horribly hard time, to the point where his hair started falling out, and those same people might have claimed they’d have been fine with Mantle breaking the record instead, but…horseshit. The problem wasn’t Maris. The problem was that someone might be better than the Babe.

Babe Ruth is…well, he’s Babe Ruth. He’s probably the best player who ever lived. (Well, the best player for whom we have complete statistics. Anecdotal evidence suggests that several players in the Negro Leagues were better than Ruth — a few of those anecdotes come from Ruth himself, actually — but the comparisons are harder to stick.) You can argue back with Mays or Mantle (or Josh Gibson, per my comments above), and have valid points in terms of comparing them as position players, but Mays and Mantle did not pitch. Ruth pitched well enough to have gotten into the Hall of Fame on that basis alone. And Mays and Mantle could hit a ton, but Ruth…Ruth not only hit a ton, he hit a ton and a half better than anyone else did, or had up to that point. Understand: he did it first. The lively ball helped him, but the man had more home runs in one season than some teams had total. Ruth represented a quantum leap forward in the game’s evolution, and that leap is widely credited with saving the game post-Black Sox. And as to that…I don’t know. People have been doomsaying the collapse and death of baseball since, seriously, the fifth inning of the first game ever played, and somehow we all keep showing up to watch it, so I don’t know that I’d hand the credit over to one guy.

But Ruth is a titan of the game, head and shoulders above the league for many years, but also beyond the game itself, one of the most famous men in the world in his time and certainly the most famous man in America. When he died, he was laid out in state at Yankee Stadium, and a hundred thousand people went up there in a heat wave, in August, to pay their respects to him, some of them standing in line for days, bringing their kids so the kids could see him, could say later that they’d seen him. Again, a function of the time, but also a function of his enormous fame, of his transcending what made him famous to become an icon of Elvis/Diana proportions. People who know nothing about baseball, people who know nothing about American culture, still know who Babe Ruth is and what he’s famous for. Everybody knows Babe Ruth. He’s synonymous with America somehow, the apex of the national pastime who loved dogs and beer as much as the fans did, big and loud and spendy.

And a function of love, as well. People loved Babe Ruth — I mean really loved him, like a family member. Admired him, of course, and wanted to hit like him, the sandlot kids, and loved to watch him play, but also just loved him, him, how he cracked jokes and climbed into the stands to talk to kids, because he loved them back.

We aren’t going to see a hundred thousand people lined up to pay their respects to Hank Aaron; we don’t lay our beloved out anymore, for one thing, which is kind of a shame, but according to my dad, who remembers Aaron breaking the record, people considered him a great player, a nice guy, a “solid citizen” who banged out 40 a year and just got it done until he couldn’t anymore — racist fucks sent him hate mail and forced him to travel under guard because of the death threats, but thinking people considered him “deserving,” that if someone had to break a record everyone thought would stand forever, Aaron was a good guy for the job.

But that universal adoration, that feeling that he belonged to us as a people, that is Ruth’s alone.

And that is absolutely not Bonds. Bonds is a dick. Bonds did not, from what I understand, enjoy the best parenting in the world, and on top of that, sometimes a child who has a famous parent absorbs certain unfortunate lessons vis-à-vis how much bullshit you can get away with if you have talent. But part of the problem is that Bonds is passing Ruth, and part of the problem is…Bonds.

And part of the problem, too, at the risk of stating the obvious, is that Bonds is perceived as having cheated, and we just want no part of him because of that, and here we are again at baseball’s tendency to overlap with our ideas of ourselves and our culture, because Americans have a strong — you might even say somewhat immature — attachment to the concept of fairness. (You may supply your own dry comment on the current administration here, if you like.) We like to think of ourselves as a meritocracy, and given that Bonds took steroids to achieve goals we think of as sacred, and is allowed to do so by baseball and by society — he isn’t punished in any real way for his misdeeds, but rather allowed to continue to chase these records — we don’t know how to put him into context.

It’s actually not that difficult, using statistics to correct for certain historical tendencies, which sabremetricians have done for everything from the dead ball era to Fenway Park’s advantages for hitters to the World War II batting champs. When we look back at the present time in twenty or thirty years, at the period between 1994 and 2006, say, we’ll see pretty clearly that everyone hit pretty well, that 25 home runs in 2001 is not the same as 25 home runs in 1968, when hitters had to deal with Bob Gibson and Sandy Koufax and .275 looked pretty good. We’ll look at hitting stats from Rockies players and know what they mean, and we’ll look at Bonds and know what he means.

Chuck Klosterman wrote a truly outstanding essay for ESPN The Magazine on the meaning of Bonds passing Ruth, in which he covers much of the ground I have, and one of his points is as follows: “We were all fools and now we have to pretend we weren’t.” We all ignored McGwire and Sosa’s obvious enhancement, he says, and now that it’s really centered in our awareness, we have to pretend that 1998 was different:

McGwire looked like a bipedal Clydesdale swinging an elm tree; he was somehow far stronger at age 34 than he had been 10 years before. Sosa was (supposedly) only 29 in 1998, which seemed slightly more reasonable; of course, he happened to be a 29-year-old man with acne, so that was a little weird. But people loved these jovial manimals, and people wanted to see the never-beloved Roger Maris erased from the record books, and people casually wondered if maybe there was something wrong with the actual baseballs. Americans tend to be conspiracy theorists, but we’re not particularly skeptical.

I won’t sit here and tell you McGwire didn’t take steroids, but the difference between McGwire when he came up and McGwire when he broke Maris’s record is not nearly as pronounced as the same difference in Bonds. McGwire always had big arms and always hit a boatload of dingers. Bonds didn’t and didn’t. But that isn’t the point, really. The point is that people kind of did want Maris out of the way, not a factor anymore, and that people definitely did enjoy watching McGwire hit home runs and did enjoy watching Sosa hit home runs in pursuit of a record, and now they don’t enjoy it when Bonds does it. Why is that?

Klosterman seems to think it’s because we know now what we didn’t know then. I see his point, but disagree. First of all…we knew. We just didn’t care, because we could ignore it, so we did, and we ignored it because, more or less, we liked McGwire and Sosa and could put it aside. We don’t like Bonds; see above re: dick. Bonds would have us believe that that is about race.

Bob Costas addressed that very thing on Costas Now; if you have access to the program on HBO On Demand, or elsewhere, I highly recommend it (I believe it airs again on May 18 at 7:30). Costas presided over a panel discussion of Bonds that included Tim McCarver, Joe Morgan, and Bob Gibson, and I have to give credit where it’s due: McCarver and Morgan seemed much more relaxed, and less gooey and defensive, respectively, than they usually do, and they both had some good insights into why players take steroids and how we should think about Bonds. Joe Morgan is not known for making any damn sense at all, much less putting a fine point on an issue, but when Costas asked, “Is this about race?”, Morgan responded, “It’s always about race.” He didn’t follow up on that comment, and I wish he had, because…well, I don’t think our issues with Bonds have to do with race. Emphasis on think. I don’t think they do. I think we hate change and hate having to adjust what we’ve always known to include new data; I think it offends our collective sense of fair play that Bonds is gaming the system; I think we don’t like it when unpleasant people do well.

But I also think that, if ESPN were interrupting broadcasts to show Ken Griffey Jr. going after 714, we would not be having any of these conversations. Of course, we aren’t having them because Griffey doesn’t juice; because Griffey doesn’t juice, his body is breaking down on him; because his body is breaking down on him, he’s out of the hunt for some of the historic numbers. But he’s a great ballplayer, and although he irritates me for reasons I can’t explain, I’ve never heard anything but that he’s a nice, friendly man who signs for the kids and comes to work ready to work every day he can. I could not give less of a shit that he’s black.

But it always comes down to the fact that a white lady like myself doesn’t have to give a shit about race, which is why I wish the panel had dealt with that question in more depth. I would like to think that Bonds’s race is not in play here, and for me, it isn’t — what’s in play for me is stuff like Bonds showing up for the 2006 season grossly overweight (and then every story is about his shitty knees…hello?). But if Joe Morgan can talk about how racial issues feed into our perceptions of Bonds, I want to hear it. If Joe Morgan can speak to a double standard when it comes to how white athletes act versus black athletes, he should. If Joe Morgan feels that black players are expected to be “nicer” than white players so that everyone is okay with having them around, he should say that, because I think that, for some people, without their even knowing it, that is true.

And I would really like to have heard Bob Gibson’s response, not least because Bob Gibson remains ten pounds of bad-ass in a five-pound bag. The man is still pissed that they lowered the mound on him, first of all — like, not joking pissed. PISSED. Second of all, if you put him on the hill today, in street clothes, and Bonds stepped in against him with the elbow armor on, and you handed Gibson the ball, Gibson would still go inside at chin level until he got to 3 and 0, and then he’d fan Bonds on a low nasty and sort of semi-stomp towards first making that “that’s right, bitch” face of his while Bonds just stood there like, “Well, shit.” Because Bob Gibson is the fucking man.

(People who don’t know who Bob Gibson is have totally gotten bored and clicked over to Cute Overload by now, but if you are familiar with the flammable glaring of Bob Gibson, just take a minute and imagine him doing other jobs, like moderating the American Idol boards or teaching kindergarten. Or if he’s your personal trainer? God, what a nightmare. Although you would be at three percent body fat in, like, a week. Or working at a pet store, hee. He picks up a gerbil, it makes the grave error of peeing on his hand…[whump!] it bursts into flames…”I’m only going to tell you puppies once: on the paper.” “Yes, sir.” “…Excuse me?” “SIR YES SIR!” “That’s what I thought you said. Damn puppies.”)

But here’s the thing about that. Roger Clemens has always had that exact same bust-them-inside, fuck-you approach, but that’s how it’s written about, for Clemens, that he will bust you inside, and fuck you, because he’s Clemens — he’s a gamer! He’s focused and intense! This is how you talk about Clemens. But when people talk about Gibson, it is fear, people. Like, seriously, even thirty, forty years later, people talk about stepping in against Gibson the way you tell a ghost story. Supernatural dread. Is it because they’d never seen that kind of single-mindedness before? Did he really pitch that hard? Or did it have something to do with his race?

I’m actually asking; I don’t know. But Bonds is giving baseball culture and American culture a hairball, for reasons that haven’t gotten discussed, really, until lately. Most fans knew something was going on, starting about ten years ago, but nobody talked about it, or they did, but they used words like “allegedly” and “apparently” and nothing got done. Most fans could tell something had changed, had a feeling something steroidal was afoot, but we weren’t discussing it, and now here we are. So if it is racial, even a little, well hell, let’s talk about that, too, because if any of this does stem from some kind of “we’ll let you play, but you shouldn’t do too well, and you should act really grateful and smiley all the time” thing — if that’s going on, or if black players feel like it is? And if Bonds reacted to that by doing literally everything he could to show up the establishment? Again, I have no way of knowing if any of that is relevant; it doesn’t really enter into my assessment until someone — usually Bonds — tells me it should. But if it should, well, let’s discuss it.

Because this is the central point: nobody knows how to talk about Bonds right now. Nobody knows how to frame his achievements, because we’ll never know what he would have done without chemical help. We’ll never know if he would have Griffeyed had he not been taking substances that let him play longer and recover faster from injuries. We’ll never know how we might have felt about him if he were white, because he isn’t, or nice, because ditto. And we still don’t know if he’s going to overtake Aaron (my prediction: he gets to 725-ish and hangs it up), so we’re all focusing on the Ruth record, because that’s what we do know; that’s where he is at the moment, a man very few people like or respect, standing beside a baseball colossus, and it’s hard to know what to do with that in our minds. Pete Rose, different version of the same problem — he has the most hits, but he’s on the ineligible list. How do we reconcile these things? How do we unstick him from our craw?

I suspect that the answer I suggested for Rose — just put him in the Hall and have done with it already — is probably the answer for Bonds as well. He had the skills without the juice, he has the single-season record with it, but perhaps the most important aspect of Bonds is that this one man has become, like him or not, acknowledge his achievements or not, an integral part of the history of the game. And for that, he is worthwhile; his numbers are worthwhile. Klosterman suggests in his piece that Bonds is an emblem of this era in America: “Tomorrow, today will be yesterday — and Bonds will represent what that was like.” He finds that kind of depressing, and I can’t really argue. But when we take comfort in What Is, we’re really talking about What Was, a magical golden time that never really existed. Babe Ruth is a near-fairytale figure, but let’s not forget that the color barrier still existed then. Pete Rose broke Ty Cobb’s record to almost no complaints from the baseball establishment, but let’s not forget that Cobb was an indefensible human being. We’ll say the same kinds of things about Bonds in thirty years’ time, putting him in context; the same way I phoned my dad today to get the perspective of his memory, listened to him talk about Mays, how he was so good it almost defied belief, how Aaron was more steady than brilliant, this is how our kids will listen to us when we talk about how it seems funny in hindsight, making such a circus out of this when The Great Pujols was playing at the same time, and did we ever tell them we saw him play once?

At least, I hope that’s how we talk about it in thirty years’ time. Until that day, we have to talk about it like this for a while, not knowing how it ends, but I think talking about it any old way, discussing and debating and putting it in context, is good.

I mean, hell, it’s talking about baseball. I called Dad to ask him one quick question and we wound up shooting the breeze for twenty minutes, so if you take the long view, nothing that gets the fans talking and keeps us interested is all bad.

May 17, 2006

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