Barry Bonds wants to overshadow this entire baseball season and harm the sport he has grown to hate and wants to hurt.
Our task is not to let him. As he hunts Hank Aaron, those who care about the game should view his tainted chase clearly, both morally and historically, then gradually ignore him and ultimately marginalize him.
Bonds may have no shame, but that doesn't mean we should have no judgment.
If he hits No. 756 and few honor it as a record, then is it one? Let's find out.
Sensing this mood, Bud Selig now says he may merely phone Bonds long distance, rather than have a celebration of a new Home Run King. Perhaps the commissioner can reduce the sport's response to a brief handwritten note: "Congratulations*."
A year ago, there was hope that Bonds would simply fade away, worn down by age, injury and, perhaps, baseball's history of undeserved good luck. "I don't even want to play next year," Bonds said last year during spring training. "Baseball is a fun sport. But I'm not having fun. I've never cared about records anyway, so what difference does it make."
Now the tune has changed utterly. Disgusted with appearing weak and, in his mind, appeasing his enemies, Bonds has embraced the dark side. "I'm playing until I'm 100," he now says. "You guys get used to me."
On his Internet site, the man who doesn't care about records has a huge "Home Run Counter" with the big number set at "734." Everything else is in small type. Passing Aaron is everything to him now. No matter how long it takes. "I'll drag it out. I'll let you guys wait. You know me," Bonds said in spring training. "The anticipation, the hype — I'll let you guys talk it up."
If it's humanly or perhaps chemically possible, he's going to make it.
On Friday, Bonds belted his first spring homer, then hit another Saturday.
"I thought I hit it straight up in the air," said Bonds. "I said, 'Darn it.' Then I saw the guys running back."
This is Bonds's sly way of telling us that, at 42, his power is back.
When he hits the ball "straight up," it still clears the fence. When he hits it squarely, cue the canoes. Proudly, Bonds points out that from last Aug. 21 to Sept. 23, he slugged .800, with 10 homers, 25 RBI, 19 walks and only 8 strikeouts in a 26-game span. Quietly, almost unnoticed, the old Bonds returned. Now, in Arizona, it looks like he's b-a-a-a-c-k, like a nightmare, needing just 22 homers to pass Aaron's pristine record.
Told no player at 42 had ever hit more than 18 homers, Bonds retorted, "I'm capable of more than that."
That's his promise and his threat. If Bonds has his way, baseball will have to swallow him all season. He's not hiding. Instead, he's beating the drum. Why not? He's had a change of heart. Last season, on his brief reality TV show ("Bonds on Bonds" on ESPN, the shame-lite network), Bonds's eyes filled with tears as he said: "If it makes them happy to go out of their way to try to destroy me, go right ahead. You can't hurt me any more than you've already hurt me."
Now, on his Web site, he says, "I'm happy, very happy." What about the weight of multiple steroid, tax and perjury probes, investigations and commissions? "It doesn't weigh on me at all, at all," Bonds repeated. "Let 'em investigate. They've been doing it this long." But doesn't he have concerns?
"None," he said defiantly.
If Bonds's current defiant stance seems to have more depth than his whiny demeanor last spring, then there's probably a simple reason. Bonds is echoing one of our oldest and most emotionally complex archetypes — the fallen angel, the proud, ambitious transgressor who is hurled from heaven.
Who knew a left fielder could stumble into such classic material?
"Better to reign in hell than serve in heaven," Milton's Satan decided in "Paradise Lost." "To be weak is miserable. . . . My sentence is for open war, which, if not victory, is yet revenge."
Many have agreed with the poet William Blake that Milton drew such a sympathetic portrait of Satan that he was "of the Devil's party without knowing it." There may be a similarly perverse temptation in our antihero culture to shrug and give Bonds a free pass into baseball history. So many sluggers have used performance-enhancing drugs in the last 20 years that it's almost impossible for fans to remember which star confessed (Jose Canseco), who got caught (Rafael Palmeiro), who is merely suspected (Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa) and who, like Bonds, has had an entire book written about his cheating ("Game of Shadows"), which is underpinned in part by leaked grand jury testimony.
When we get confused in complex cases, we tend to throw up our hands and err on the side of leniency. This is devilishly easy. But in Bonds's case, we should not fall into the trap — because it isn't necessary. Let the courts decide whether Bonds broke any laws, including perjury before a grand jury and tax evasion. And let baseball decided, with the aide of its Mitchell commission or other investigations, whether there is enough evidence of steroid use to deny Bonds the homer record.
For baseball fans, the question is simpler. We aren't sending anybody to jail, taking away his salary, preventing him from playing or even deciding whether his records deserve an asterisk or a complete erasure. We just have to decide what we think. The court of public opinion has weight.
And in this decision process, one extremely important event took place recently.
Last month, Troy Ellerman, one of Victor Conte's lawyers in the BALCO case, pleaded guilty to leaking the grand jury information that was used by the San Francisco Chronicle reporters who also wrote "Game of Shadows." He faces two years in prison and a $250,000 fine. He had his own motives for leaking. Apparently, he thought it might cause a mistrial of his client.
What matters to fans, however, is that there is now no doubt that crucial reporting in the Chronicle and "Shadows" was, in fact, based on direct knowledge of grand jury testimony by and about Bonds. For me, this removes the last scintilla of reasonable doubt.
On Bonds's Web site, he's asked in a recent interview whether baseball should have a celebration this year of the 60th anniversary of Jackie Robinson integrating baseball. "I hope baseball celebrates it," Bonds said. "The important thing is that we, as a league, need to celebrate what's right."
Yes, indeed, we should "celebrate what's right." Just as we should ignore or refuse to celebrate what is not right.
Sympathy for the devil is more than a song title. Everybody deserves understanding as well as judgment. But when it comes to the homer record, there is a clear line in the dirt. Aaron earned it properly. Bonds didn't.
In this one instance, numbers on a page in a statistics book don't change a deeper truth. Hank Aaron is baseball's home run champion. Barry Bonds will never be.