Saturday July 21, 2007

So baseball stands waiting, unsure what to do with itself, with Barry Bonds now three home runs away from passing the greatest record in American sports. It was announced today that the grand jury investigating him on grounds of perjury, based on his testimony before a previous grand jury investigating steroids trafficking, has been extended and may soon issue an indictment. After waffling on the subject, the commissioner of baseball is attending Bonds’ games this weekend, if for no other reason than that they are in his hometown of Milwaukee. The slugger is booed mercilessly at every stop on every road trip — until he hits a home run and the crowd finds itself unsure what to do. (I can personally attest to this, having seen #706 in DC.) And of course, the obligatory media circus that has followed him for the last six years straight has reached a fever pitch, digging around for anything that can be passed off as pseudo-news for distribution to every newspaper, television station, and Internet site imaginable. In short, everything surrounding the pursuit of the always “dignified” Hank Aaron is completely, thoroughly surreal.

Of course, if you even peripherally follow baseball, you knew all that already. It’s this surreal quality, however, that is perhaps why so many people are distraught at Bonds’ assault at 755. There is the steroids factor, but it is a well-established fact that Aaron and his contemporaries popped amphetamines like candy, so it’s hard to make the claim that every accomplishment prior to 1998, or even 1988, was done without the use of chemical enhancement. Regardless, the quality and quantity of workout regimens and other factors — spurred by the fact that athletes are paid so absurdly well that a mediocre pitcher who, when healthy, starts 32 games in a season can be paid $11 million — has essentially made the players of today a completely different animal when compared to those of the past, regardless of what has been ingested by, rubbed on, or injected into today’s hitters (and pitchers).

Barry Bonds is the prototypical 21st century hero — to the distress of those attached to the 20th. I don’t think my generation gives a damn about the legitimacy of whatever total is reached when “Jon Dowd” finally decides to hang up his cleats. Granted, some of this may be due to the fact that we didn’t see Hank Aaron set the record or the socio-racial significance attached to that event, but the primary reason is the world as the millennial generation has known it. We’re used to not having anyone to admire unconditionally (and don’t feel like we’ve missed much); we’ve grown up in a world where most marriages end in divorce, every celebrity is scrutinized if not stalked by the press, and politicians no longer have to even pay lip service to reality (let alone the voting public). Why not have a cheating jackass hold the sacred record? There have been plenty among the game’s greats; it’s just that time eroded the undesirable facts about them, leaving only the achievements. I say he is the perfect record-holder for the 21st century, the era of the dysphoric chimera. So I’ll clap when Bonds hits #756, presumably sometime next week in front of him home crowd. What good is it to do otherwise?

Besides, Alex Rodriguez will break the new record in the mid-2010s anyway.