March 22, 2005

HEY BARRY, YOU HAVE MY SYMPATHY—OKAY I’M LYING

       So there’s Barry Bonds, standing with his son, whining about his predicament in life and blaming the media for his depression.  He says that he needs to take some time off—six months, one year, whatever—to get healthy, both physically and emotionally.  He’s tired, his family is tired, his dog is tired.   Wah, wah, wah.   C’mon Barry, you’re really taking the time off so that your body can have enough time to clean itself—to rid itself of any evidence that would put you in the Mark McGwire circle of non-admitting cheaters (it’s not like you’re not there already).  Take however long you need to heal—personally I think you should take the rest of your life off, and give the rest of us a break.

       You cry that everyone seems to be out to get you.  You complain that everything you do is investigated and analyzed, and nobody understands you.  Yes, of course, it’s all a vendetta.  Everyone hates you—for no reason—and we’re all out to bring you down.  I know I have nothing better to do with my life than to think up reasons why you should fail.  How can you possibly expect anyone to support you?  You’ve been such a major league ass for so long, treating people as if they constantly interfere with your attempts to forge a normal life.   Sure, it’s the media’s fault that you have lied about your past, berated those who question your denials, use the race card whenever there’s a so-called intrusion into your life, and it’s the media’s fault that they don’t embrace you when you bray about your abilities, condemn those that criticize you and whine about a lack of respect.  Yup, makes me want to just run over and give you a big old bear hug.

       You have been accused by a former girlfriend—aren’t you married, Barry? —of taking, an admitting to, the usage of steroids.  You are under investigation, soon to be audited by the IRS, for supposedly not claiming a great amount of money for autograph signing, and you have admitted to a grand jury that you used a steroid cream, though you didn’t know that it was steroids.  That last statement means that you either lied to the Grand Jury, or you are about as big an idiot as you are an ass.  Which is it, Barry, cheater or idiot?  Pick your poison—or should I say drug. 

       You watched the congressional hearings and saw what happened to former icon Mark McGwire.  Didn’t you used to say that McGwire was worshiped because he was white, and you were not because you were not?  I guess you now realize that cheating has no race—that if McGwire can now be painted with a cheating stroke, so can you.  And believe me, you will.  Unless you retire.  Of course, there are forty million reasons why you’ll simply take a sabbatical from the game and not retire.  You wouldn’t want to forfeit that much money—not when money means so much to you.

       So you’ll take the time to supposedly rehabilitate your knees—isn’t it ironic that McGwire was forced to retire because of his knees.  Sorry, Barry, the joints aren’t made to carry that much extra muscle.  But then that’s probably the media’s fault, if not the fault of the fans.  And you’ll take the time to hopefully rest your tired body, your tired family and your tired dog. 

       Take a little advice from a very knowledgeable and long-time baseball fan—retire.  You should stay at 703 home runs and be thankful that baseball didn’t have the right testing available to keep you from becoming one of the game’s all-time best hitters.  You have no right to include yourself in the company of the man who single-handedly saved baseball after the Black Sox scandal, Ruth, or, more importantly, the man who broke the all-time home run record while enduring an amount of hate you could not even imagine, Aaron.  You couldn’t be satisfied being a solid 30-30 man, you watched the accolades that McGwire received, knew what Big Mac did to get there and wanted the same for yourself.  Didn’t you think it would be suspicious for a man in his mid-thirties to go from being a 30-something home run man annually to suddenly being the single season home run king? 

     You made a deal with the devil, and now you are just going to have to pay the price for that pact.