A Tale of Two Twitties pt. 1

Twit #1:

Barry Lamar Bonds.

Looks like the man everyone loves to hate might be headed for prison for perjury and obstruction of justice. Appearently the Grand Jury doesn't take kindly to being lied to and doesn't often indict a person unless they have some pretty good evidence against him. The feds. Go figure.

This situation really is a crying shame. I don't care if you hate Bonds (like practically everybody outside San Francisco) or if you love Bonds, this is going to be a pretty terrible end to what should have been a first-ballot Hall of Fame career.

For me the real tradgedy is this: Bonds is one of the top ten baseball players of all time, even without using hgh, or steroids, or whatever they said he used. I mean, take away whatever number you think his perfomance enhancing substances have added to his HR total, and Bonds will still wind up with more than 500 dingers and 500+ stolen bases. The only other players to reach the 300/300 plateau in HRs and SBs are father Bobby Bonds, godfather Willie Mays, and Andre Dawson.

There is no other 400/400 guy.

There is no other 500/500 guy.

There is no other 500/600 guy.

Or 500/700 guy.

Or 500/800 guy.

The man has lived in his own stratosphere when considering the best two measurements of power hitting and speed that has ever played the game. You could take away half his HRs and still make this claim. I personally would give him around 650 lifetimes HRs without the juice, but I have no medical or scientific knowledge to back this claim up. I just like the number, I guess.

Alas, I come to bury Barry, not to praise him. It's a tradjedy because Mr. Bonds couldn't be satisfied with being one of the greatest to play the game. He had to be the best. Perhaps he knew that Mark McGuire and Sammy Sosa were juicing, and all their attention in 1995 made him jealous. I don't know. I wasn't there. Nobody asked me.

But since you asked: I think Bonds couldn't handle all the praise these guys were getting, and his ego couldn't leave him out. He knew at this latter stage in his career that he would need enhancement in order to break McGuire's single season HR record of 70, so he juiced, or creamed, or flax seed oiled. Whatever.

After hitting 73, he saw Aaron's all time mark in his headlights and he went for it. At this point he probably figured that every additional HR equated to another detractor shutting up. After all, didn't I open this post up by saying that we all have a number that we'll mentally subtract from whatever total Bonds winds up with? You have a number, you know you do.

To me it's like he's been padding his stats to take away ammunition from as many of his detractors as he can.

Some say no team will touch him now. Here's evidence to the contrary.