Don’t mean nothing.

Don’t change nothing.

I will take what I believe is, for me, the appropriate amount of pleasure from baseball.

I will be happy and excited when the giants are in the race, or, maybe again someday, the postseason.

But my world won’t fall apart when they lose. It’s the games and the very partisanship under fire here that I enjoy. Hell, babe, I CAME to root. I’m a fan. A Giants fan.

Fall 2002 was fun, and as part of this fan’s baseball life, it was very special. And Bonds is one of the things that made it special.

Of course I’ll give him a pass. He hasn’t done anything to me…

mikey

I took “owned by rich men as much as it was when it became the national pastime” to go back further than 1966. I too remember Koufax and Drysdale, Flood and Messersmith.

Workers control the means of production? Is that what Curt Flood was aiming for?

I’m simply saying that the Players Union, free agency and agent representation changed things for the better.

Players do not face the whims of owners today just as they did back in the time of Chas. Comiskey. If Curt Flood was around, he’d tell you the same…

And look – put the asterisk on if you want to. Have the fucking balls to write a steroid-free record book of baseball that eliminates all the MVPs, Cy Youngs and World Series champs of the “tainted” years. Do THAT work instead of constantly complaining that “they” (the Dead-Enders or whatever) won’t allow the truth to be told.

Nobody’s stopping you from writing your pure-as-the-driven-snow fan’s history of baseball, except your own laziness.

Correct up to the comma, wrong thereafter.

Michael Humphreys — good for you to drop in. And of course it doesn’t surprise me that James’s first instinct matched that of so many Primates.

Remember the good ol days when people like us — just for stating the obvious, that these players were cheaters — were called racists, character assassins, serial smearers, etc etc; flamed to no end by the most pathetic sorts of fanboys imaginable? Yeah, well, now’s the time for Truth’s triumph over Error; paybacks are hell and I admit to some satisfaction at turning the other fist. I know you, Andy, JC, Backlasher, and kevin have got to share in the feeling of vindication, not to mention the sheer joy in knowing that the steroids-frauds will be denied historical glory they never deserved. Now we have to work on that asterisk, and restoring Aaron’s rightful place… it’ll be exactly like taking from Thomas Sowell to give to Dr. King. Restitution, baby!

Consensus *is* forming; the Dead-enders are more demoralized by the day; the cheaters’ reputations weather into evermore unrecognizable rubble. Baseball will never be completely clean, but the events of the past few months go a long way to making it better for everyone.

Or are you entitled to a special standard just because your team sucks?

The whole point, mikey, is that, no, you are *not* like everyone else. You alone are Dead-enders.

I thought, yeah, Les, says it clearly, and HTML will GET that there’s both sides, that we can love something without, or even before, we fully understand it. We can be raised as baseball partisans, and it doesn’t make us complicit, it makes us the same as him.

Fans.

And, sadly, Mencken didn’t back down. He won’t admit that he is us, that the love of the game is the same no matter what team you cheer for, and the heroes are your heroes, and it doesn’t require any kind of evil at all to be who you are, and to root for the team you were raised to root for.

And that very lack of imagination, Mencken, that very inability to understand what we’re saying, when you are saying the same fucking thing, that selfish claim to righteous baseball fandom when we all just love what we were raised to love, that’s what sickens and offends me.

Have you opinions. Believe what you believe. But for christ’s sake, understand what makes us fans, and what we love, and are clinging to with all our might. And if you feel we are somehow criminal for loving the game and the team we were raised to love, you, not us, are the sad, tragic wasted angry little man.

Not us…

mikey

I’m reading the whole friggin’ report. It’s not a bad piece of work (I’m at page 20).

Oh, and I also told James in ’02 I had my suspicions about Sir Roger Clemens. Again, my position was ridiculed.

I still smile broadly when I think of him hitting No. 71 or No. 757.

Yes, with all the sophistry stripped away, that’s exactly what it boils down to. As I said above, the fans of other teams with renowned cheaters have no problem disowning their villains. Only SF Giants fans circle the wagons around their false idol: “You will not take the Precious from us!!!”

So what that he cheated. So what that his cheating put marginal players’ health at risk by coercing them to juice to keep parity. So what that he fucked Hank Aaron, by far his moral and physical superior. So what that he made a mockery of the sport you purport to love. So what that he has until recently evaded all justice. The important thing is that he’s *your* Barry, and nothing can take him away!

In more innocent times, among a less nihilist fan base, the revelation that a star cheated stung: ‘say it ain’t so!’ But it was so, hearts were broken, the villain was disowned, and the team reaped a karmic reward. Nowadays, hearts refuse to be broken because it’s all about selfishness and tribalism; ‘say it ain’t so’ becomes ‘we’ll fight to the death denying that it’s so, Mr. Baseball God’ with a wink and a secret handshake. Pathetic.

“Will Clark, Jeffrey Leonard, Barry Bonds — hell, even Dave Fucking Kingman had his admirers in San Fran.”

Please…. San Fran? Tres Georgetown… Very bad lamer non-west cost talk. Kind of like calling LA the Big Orange… definitely bad form. I’m sure there is an equivalent usage in your hometown that marks the unobservant transplant.**** SF, pronounced esss effff, or simply The City, is more authentic local parlance.

Your short list, while sprinkled with greatness, Wiiiiillll the Shrill as #1 is highly appropriate and Jeff Leonard was the best at whatever it was he did, ran into fences better than any player I saw, kind of a National League Freddy Lynn in that category, also very good at holding up his mitt to indicate he had made a catch, one of the greatest glowerers ever to grace Candlestick Park, (quite a pantheon of pinched brows and hooded eyes down the years in Giants baseball history), ultra rug or live grass, is OK, but… you left off lots of guys like er, Montefusco, or Kevin Mitchell, though he turned into a kind of jolly gangster black Santa in his later years, and the ‘God Squad’ pitching staff, the bizarre tragedies of Dave Novicky & Roger Metzger, Brett “Butt” Butler, or one of my personal favorites from the old days (a direct link to the ‘glory days’ of baseball…i.e. before Jackie Robinson) Mr. Alvin Dark;

“Latin American ballplayers have come a long way since the days when a manager could issue an edict, as the Giants’ Alvin Dark did in 1964, prohibiting players from speaking Spanish in the clubhouse. ”

You never even mentioned my personal #1 Giant to hate, the man most likely to be picked off on first base in the late innings of a close game, Jack Clark. To say nothing of the first BB, Bobby the father, a very complex, errrr… difficult, personality. Truly Giants fan have supped at a very mixed grill when it comes to the fine dining experience that should be a hometown’s birthright… and now, sigh, the reign of Barry…*

The Red Sox fans among us wear their frustration as a badge of courage. Every year at playoff time its like the annual Shriner’s parade with a float for the goat and The Babe’s Picture and Buckners legs… almost as iconic as Lexington Green or Paul Revere’s ride. A national treasure trove of baseball disappointment. The Yankees, the Cubs, the Dodgers, even the Twins, all have aspects of life that their fandom, shall we say, illuminates. We Giants fans must suffer a very different fate. Our shame is a private stain. The fandom that dare not speak it’s name. Our heroes, unlike the rest of the league, are tainted. Ego, hatred, bigotry is the burden of the Giants fan.**

Today the game of baseball is an entertainment for the populace owned by rich men as much as it was when it became the ‘national pastime,’ and the men who play it are subject to the whims of the owners now just as they were then. We are allowed and encouraged to observe this glorious public display of physical agility and prowess, but what we feel about it has little effect on how the enterprise is carried out. Barry Bonds, son of a baseball star, and like his own son, on the field picking up his Dad’s bats when he was a batboy, is a product of that system. Whatever choice he made was inside the context of an industry that only cares about your numbers, that ultimately only rewards results.***

I’m a grown up in LA, east side, almost Orange County,**** Dodger fan who moved to SF 30 years ago and loves live baseball. Could I continue to ‘hate’ my local team forever? For me I found out I couldn’t. Now I’m a Giants fan and I like to think of Willie Mays, Cepeda & McCovey, the Alou brothers, Johnnie LeMaster falling down after missing a fastball at the plate, Rick Ruschel throwing junk late, Jose Uribe & Robbie Thompson turning it, Kevin Mitchell barehand or banging line drives off the chainlink fence in left or the concrete parking lot out there where the kids used to get raspberries fighting over home runs, or home runs into the water at the new yard, even the ones Barry hits. Like a fan of any team the list goes on and on and on. We’re not really bad HTML, we’re just misunderstood OK?

I’m not at all a fan of Barry Bonds. He’s a well documented jerk. You are perfectly justified in having the strong opinion about him that you do and I generally concur, but you have tarred the Giants fan with a wide brush in this piece and I believe you have hamstringed your own argument by doing so. I would like to offer up a name for the problem that afflicts you, BDS, Bonds Derangement Syndrome. I think your hatred of Bonds maybe affecting your emotion ‘governor.’ I feel the same way about the entire Yankee organization, just can’t seem to have a civil discussion about that fuckin’ team…

…………………………………………………………………

*of course he’s a prick, you think we don’t know it? It is our house he’s pissing in after all…

**Though the Red Sox, I believe, do have their own checkered history in the race department…

***me, I think the cream was tainted along with the flaxseed oil

****the OC… really, really lame, like calling Westchester County the WC… I’m serious! Don’t do it. Cut that crap now!

Which is why I think steroids should be legalized and openly used.

I don’t see that this makes for a healthy workplace. Most athletes are not going to be heroes and I don’t buy that allowing people to destroy themselves for wish-fulfillment is a good thing to enshrine in a rulebook.

And the fact is, I don’t feel that way. I mean, I could say I do, but I’d be lying. I get why you hate him as a cheater. I don’t like that he did what he did with the ‘roiding, either. But I am afraid that my very soul does not scream out for his traitorous blood 24/7, and in fact I still smile broadly when I think of him hitting No. 71 or No. 757.

Sorry, guess I’m just a Dead-Ender scumbag at heart.

Clemens comes close in flagrancy, but to match Bonds perfectly, he would have had to top Cy Young’s record for career wins, and of course he didn’t.

This just doesn’t make any sense. You’re saying that Bonds is *more culpable* for steroid use than Clemens (or any other ballplayer I guess) because he broke some records? Huh?

I mean, I get that you’re more pissed off at Bonds than everyone else because he “taints” the HR records he holds. But it’s a giant leap to accuse him of being more “flagrant” in his cheating than Clemens, because by an accident of birth one was born in an era when it was possible to challenge HR records and the other at a time when it was impossible to get anywhere near the starts to challenge the pitching wins record.

That’s just silly and arbitrary.

Oooh. Since you’re gonna go *there* — attributing bad faith — then allow me to retort. It’s because *you* have so much personally invested in Bonds that you defend his every depravity — and, by extention, all other cheaters so as to remain consistent and somewhat mask your true interest — that I have to concentrate on Bonds. Stop your Dead-enders’ crusade for St. Barry, and I’ll argue the more general point.

Whatever floats your boat. I don’t see a big difference in analogizing Bonds to (bad apple) England or (bad apple) Calley.

The point being, everybody knows about Mai Lai and next to nobody knows about the military establishment’s role in covering it up. It has been successfully repackaged as an aberrational atrocity, the work of a couple “bad apples”.

If you want to do the same thing with steroids in baseball, which you claim to care deeply about, by participating so loudly in the “bad-apple-ization” of Barry Bonds, go right ahead.

Your efforts do nothing to help people to understand the systemic nature of the PED problem, and in fact hinder such understanding by focusing so narrowly on just one cheater and one alone, but never mind. Keep it up.

December 14, 2007 at 3:39
If it was only millionaires we were talking about I’d be less on the side of the, uh, angels (?) but there are a lot of folks out there trying to become one of them there rich guys, and it’s really the shlubs I was thinking about as opposed to people like Barry Bonds.

Which is why I think steroids should be legalized and openly used.