Bonds Closing in

Barry Bonds is really close now. He was stuck on 751 for a while and the seriousness of the chase was missing until he hit 2 home runs at Wrigley last week. Now at 753, people can feel it. Record number of fans showed for his games at Wrigley and Milwaukee and the tickets for next weeks home games at San Francisco are becoming pricier by the minute. Looks like the Giants might have managed this perfectly. He did not start 3 of the 4 games at Wrigley and now he needs 3 to break the record. With a game at Milwaukee and then 7 at home, you would think it happens at home. That was always such a big deal in this story and things look good now for Bonds and the Giants. On the road, people are there to see him do his thing, but they do boo him. It's not a real aggressive "boo", just a gentle one. Some people do bring some steroids sign for him.

The other part of the story is how Bud Selig is just confused about what to do. Looks like he wants to stay away, but just can't because most experts say he should go. Of course he should. He pretty much presided over the entire steroid era and how dare he pretend to take the moral high ground now? There is no moral high ground here and he better do his job. He is the commissioner of MLB and this is one of the biggest events in baseball and it's his job to represent. I am not a fan of Bonds or this steroid era and I do consider all these records tainted, but Selig is part of the problem and I am not going to let him even think about dissociating himself from this mess. He should have fixed this 10 or 15 years back. Apparently Hank Aaron is a close friend of his and he is really upset that Bonds is passing Aaron with all this steroid clouds hanging over his head. Well, tough luck Bud. You are the freaking commissioner of Baseball and who else can you blame for his debacle?

At the end of the day, the real loser is baseball and I don't think baseball even gets it. People just keep talking about how strong the game is and how the attendance is growing and how apparently all this steroid scandal has not hurt anything. But this historic chase has been completely devalued by the steroid scandal. In this day and age of 24 hour sports radio hype and hero worship, baseball could have milked this like nothing else, but the hype is muted because of who's chasing the record. It's going to be this way until they fix the steroid thing for good, which, by the way, could be impossible the way science is going. MLB probably lost a lot of revenue in terms of jersey sales etc. because of Bonds and steroids. All the talk is about steroids and not the chase. This chase could be the very definition of the word "tainted".