755 and a Bunch of Walks

I happened to turn on the tv Saturday night for the second inning of the Giants-Padres game. Barry Bonds hit Clay Hensley’s fourth pitch deep into left center field to tie Hank Aaron. Ironically, Hensley once was suspended from the minor leagues for steroid use (he was sent to the minors right after the game). Bonds was so sure of this one that he stopped to admire his swing then just walked-trotted the bases. The crowd greeted the event with a mixture of respectful cheers and boos. Someone threw a ball back on the field from the left field stands, though it wasn’t the actual ball. Major League Baseball puts a special but invisible mark on each of Bonds’s balls these days to prevent multiple claims of having the actual artifact.

In his next three at bats, Bonds got walked. When he hit number 754 against the Marlins eight days earlier, he was walked his next four times up. Okay, Bonds likely did use the stuff (unlike Hensley and dozens of others though he’s never tested positive), but isn’t anyone going to say anything about how gutless all these so-called major league pitchers are? Barry Bonds is going through what may be the worst hitting slump of his Giants career (he had one truly bad year his second season as a Pirate), he’s forty three years old, and the pitchers still treat the guy as if he were Babe Ruth in his prime. Personally, I find the collective lack of guts of roughly half of national league pitchers a bigger scandal than the steroids thing.

In 1973, the year Aaron broke Ruth’s record, Hammering Hank drew 39 walks in 340 at bats. In his final season, he drew 35 and hit .229 as a designated hitter for the Brewers. Babe Ruth, in 1927, his signature year when he hit 60 home runs, the Bambino drew 137 walks. With two months of the season left, Bonds has 113. At this point, Bonds is presumably clean. One can argue that it’s not the numbers that tell you how special a player is in any sport, it’s the respect shown by opponents on the field. The record that will soon belong to Bonds may be tainted, but no player has ever been shown this kind of respect. The pitchers are sending the clear message that Bonds is every bit the equal of Ruth and Aaron.

Let’s go more contemporary. Alex Rodriguez, whom everyone insists is clean, became the youngest player at 32 to hit 500 home runs for his career. Still in his prime and in the midst of a great year even by his standards, Arod has 65 walks so far. Albert Puljos, the best of the younger hitters in the game, has 24 home runs (3 more than Bonds) and 67 walks this year. While the walk totals are also a measure of the three sluggers supporting casts (Ryan Klesko who hits behind Bonds has all of 5 home runs this year), it still suggests that pitchers treat the ancient and slumping Bonds as at least as dangerous as either Arod or Puljos. How weird is that? Actually, how incredible is that?

That’s the irony. There are great chunks of Barry’s career when he wasn’t juiced. Even Mark Fainaru-Wada and Lance Williams, the authors of Game of Shadows, wrote that Bonds did not do the evil deed until 1998. Given the intense level of scrutiny since BALCO broke, I also assume that Bonds has been clean for the last 3-4 years (BALCO broke in 2003). I have no idea what the residual benefits of prior steroids and HGH use would be btw, but every other player accused of using them reverted shockingly quickly to mediocrity after they stopped. Take a look at Brady Anderson, Bobby Estellela, Marvin Bernard, etc. Even stranger, most steroid users become more brittle with age. For instance, within two years of hitting his 70, Mcgwire was all but out of baseball. Okay, maybe Barry wouldn’t have home run records, but the controversy obscures some pretty remarkable feats.

Consider this. At age 43, Bonds has stolen 5 bases without being caught. In 5 seasons, he’s stolen 21 bases and been thrown out once. Barry has more home runs after age 40 than any player in history. Based on the way the pitchers are still responding to him, he’s not exactly done and he basically missed an entire season at 41 with a knee injury. At 43, he still plays left field, not very well these days, but quite remarkable in its way because he hasn’t yet taken advantage of the designated hitter rule (except when the team plays in American League parks). Has there ever been a 43 year old guy whom a major league team depended on as their main slugger?

I don’t condone what Barry Bonds did, but I think he deserves his moment. To hear his critics, it’s as if the entire baseball drug scandal will be purged if we can somehow torture Barry Bonds like something out of Shirley Jackson’s story “the Lottery”. Bonds is really not the guy who screwed up the “sacred” numbers of the game. Sammy Sosa has fours seasons of 60 or more home runs. Rich Aurilia had 37 home runs in 2001 and no more than 23 in any other season, yet his name has never been linked to the scandal or Ernie Banks. Jason Giambi has an MVP award, a huge contract, and the apparent forgiveness of Yankees fans. Booing Bonds doesn’t change any of those things. If you want to punish Barry Bonds for doing steroids in a way that will truly get to him, the answer is very simple- make sure that Jeff Kent gets into the Hall of Fame before he does or possibly even worse have the two go in together.

Maybe I shouldn’t have popped up from the couch and started cheering when Barry tied Hank. I know there are reasons not to, but when he hits 756 either this week or some time in late September, I’ll probably do the same thing. Whatever he did, I, in more than forty years of watching baseball, have never seen a hitter whom pitchers tried harder to avoid even when he wasn’t using.

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