Put a Smile on My Face, Bud: Keep Barry Off the Field

I drove a car to the supermarket today. It was the weirdest feeling of my life. I was a 24 year-old trapped in a 16 year-old's body. To feel so much younger and so much purer is a great feeling. I called my dad to rejoice and I had one of those Jerry Maguire moments where he sings Tom Petty in his car and just feels really good.


How then, I ask, can a person feel so much better, so much stronger, so much more rejuvenated? Cause however it can be done, I want some of it.

I came home to check ESPN.com as I do about 42 other times a day and I learned the answer. Barry Bonds.

I don't like playing the morality card. I know college football and basketball players get paid under the table and that does not bother me. I know that many athletes cheat on their wives and do cocaine and all sorts of other bad stuff. But that doesn't really bother me.

What bothers me is Barry Bonds. I grew up in the generation before steroids, or at least before they led to dudes hitting a ton of homeruns. As a kid, Mark McGwire and Andre Dawson hitting 49 homeruns was the biggest thing in the world.

When Kevin McReynolds hit 22 one season, I signed the bat I made in 2nd grade wood-work – Kevin McReynolds. I loved baseball a lot more as a kid than I do now mostly because I was a lot dumber.

Now, the thought of Barry Bonds having the coolest record in sports just makes me upset.

He's not even a good villain. Chipper Jones is a good villain. You loved to hate Chipper Jones and he plays so well off of that negative energy. With Bonds, you just don't really like to think of him. It's like thinking of a girl on the toilet or your parents having sex: there are some things in life that are better left out of my thought process. I feel that way about Barry Bonds.

It's not that I think he did steroids. It's that I know he did something and whatever that something is, it serves as a taint. I would give all the money in the world for this to be Ken Griffey Jr. on the brink of history. He was the lefty with the beautiful swing and the smile on his face.


But with Barry Lamar Bonds there is something different. This guy got good at hitting home runs when he all of a sudden got a lot bigger. He didn't change his swing, he just got bigger.

In my mind there is only one way that Bonds can get out of his situation. He needs to tell us something. If he was taking creatine, good. If he was taking a ton of protein, that’s also good. But all this guy does is ignore the topic.

Major League Baseball disallowed the contract that Barry Bonds signed this week because it had a stipulation that said that the contract could be void if Bonds was indicted. The concept of that alone is enough to make you sick. But in my mind, this could be Bud Selig's legacy.


Selig knows that he presided over what is widely considered a corrupt era in baseball history. This corruption will lead to one of baseball's greatest records being broken. My advice to Selig: Take a stand. Keep Bonds out of baseball and keep him away from breaking the record that we all know and respect so much.

There isn't a person in the country, outside of San Francisco, who is rooting for Bonds. Most of the people in San Francisco are too busy hiking to really care either way.

But there are millions of people that don't want to see Bonds break this record. Not because he is an asshole. Not because he is boring. But because we all think he is a cheater. Selig blocking Bonds would be less of a crime to Bonds than it would be a gift to all of us that still think baseball is a game for kids.

So Bud, if you happen to read this pro-Mets, anti-Yankees blog, grow a pair and do something that no one expects. Shock the world, baseball and Bonds and don't let Barry play. Do it directly or indirectly but just don't let him on the field in 2007.

Do that and I will feel like I felt today driving in my car to the supermarket. I'll feel like a kid in a grown kid's body.

And that to me is worth a hell of a lot.

VCD,

Sip

(Images corutesy of americanrhetoric.com and mlb.com)