The Bonds of Affection
Say Hey Barry chases 70. Should we care?

By Geoffrey Norman
August 18-19, 2001

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arry Bonds, outfielder for the San Francisco Giants, hit his 52nd and 53rd home runs of the season on Thursday night. This breaks the franchise record for most home runs in a season by a Giant — the record had been held by a former outfielder named Willie Mays, who hit 52 in 1965.

Mays had his most memorable seasons before that, back when the Giants played out of New York and the number 60 still resonated as the unattainable figure. That, of course, was the number of home runs that Babe Ruth had hit in 1927. Roger Maris, also of the Yankees, broke that record in 1961, and Billy Crystal recently did a movie about it for HBO. Maris, it seems, was under intense pressure, and the fans did not appreciate him; in the eyes of many, he was committing something close to sacrilege. Ruth owned that record like Judy Garland owned "Somewhere Over the Rainbow." It was not a thing for journeymen like Roger Maris to trifle with.

The Maris record held up for more than three decades. Then, in 1998, Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa went mano a mano and tore up baseball and all the record books. McGwire finished the season with an astonishing 70 home runs — a record, many thought, to last the ages.

But like so much else, an age just isn't what it used to be. Barry Bonds is "on track" to set a new record. Sport pages are following his pursuit of McGwire's record the way polls track a presidential race after Labor Day. In his record-breaking season, McGwire had hit 47 home runs after 121 games. At the same point in this season, Bonds has hit 53. Gosh, maybe he'll hit 80. Who knows.

Or cares.

Well, plenty of fans do care, clearly. Still, it seems obvious that as home runs get easier to come by (cheaper, to put it plainly) the record becomes more and more like one of those professional wrestling titles — Champion of the Whole Wide World, the Solar System, the Galaxies Beyond, and All the Known Universe — and the people who hold it are less and less adored. Maris (and Mickey Mantle, who chased him while he chased Ruth) were both dead before their duel was immortalized by HBO. Maris left baseball soon after his mythic season, and ran a beer distributorship before dying of cancer. He is not, to say the least, one of the gods of baseball, reigning with Aaron, Mays, DiMaggio, Williams, Hornsby, or even Mantle in the sport's Olympus in Cooperstown.

He was a so-so ball player who could hit for power. Fans never loved him.

McGwire is also a so-so ballplayer. A big man, who made himself bigger on weights and supplements, and can hit with astonishing power. When McGwire catches one flush, it goes yard. He is a one-dimensional player — though you have to admit that in that one dimension, he is a giant. He brings his lunch bucket and plays hard, if not artfully. He is easy to like, and hard to idolize.

McGwire had a tough time with the media in his record-breaking season. Answering the same questions over and over was, at first, excruciating for him. Like many alpha-male athletes, he was uncomfortable in the spotlight, and resented what he saw as intrusions into his territory. But he is a pro, and, with practice, he learned to give a good interview — even to work a press conference for a few laughs. But there will almost certainly never be a movie, on HBO or anywhere else, about McGwire and his epic season. He was not chasing an immortal, after all; merely Roger Maris. The fans were on his side. And anyway, baseball was increasingly becoming a home-run game. Fans expected more and bigger homers, and baseball knows where its bread is buttered.

So now comes Barry Bonds to break McGwire's record — and this fan, at least, finds himself thinking: "So what?" The Giants will be playing Atlanta this weekend, so Bonds will face some of the best pitching in baseball — Maddux, Glavine, etc. But I still expect my sporting attention to be on the PGA championship. Tiger Woods vs. David Duval is more compelling than Bonds vs. Glavine.

One obvious, and fairly benign, reason for this is that no record is very interesting if it is routinely broken. The DiMaggio hitting streak is compelling precisely because it seems so Olympian and unattainable.

But there are other reasons as well for tuning out of the homer hype. When ESPN.com's Page 2 (one of the web's great sites, by the way) recently asked fans to name the ten most disagreeable players in the history of baseball, Bonds was right up there with Ty Cobb, Roger Clemens, John Rocker, and Albert Belle. Which comes as no surprise.

Bonds is a great athlete: strong and fast, with a petulant, narcissistic personality. His trademark is not so much his towering home runs, but rather his tendency to stand at the plate after he connects, admiring his own art. Problem is, sometimes those balls don't clear the fence, and Bonds doesn't get as many bases as he could have, or should have. Which costs his team. But then, Bonds is in a race with McGwire from three seasons ago. He isn't "about" — as they say — a pennant race with the Arizona Diamondbacks in 2001.

Bonds insists the record is unimportant, and will ice a reporter who asks about it. He treats the media with about the same contempt as he holds for the old baseball maxim that says you run everything out. According to USA Today, Bonds tells reporters that if they ask him about home runs, he will walk away.

Roger Maris — who chased Babe Ruth's record under vastly tougher scrutiny than poor Barry Bonds will ever know — soldiered manfully through his ordeal by media; and he had a lot less going for him than Bonds has. Maris had neither Bonds's experience with the attention (his father was a Major Leaguer, and his godfather is …Willie Mays), nor a media even marginally inclined to sprinkle him with stardust. Bonds has it easy but he makes it look hard. Which is — as they also say — totally bass ackwards. A real professional, you see, makes the hard things look easy.