When Chickens come home to Roost: Should Barry Bonds be on ESPN everyday?
I really wish the media would leave Barry Bonds alone. At this point in time its becoming annoying. I cannot go very far into any ESPN broadcast without hearing something about Barry Bonds. I’ve honestly tuned it out. The other day I was watching the Annual Spelling Bee and they had a crawler on the bottom reporting breaking news about Barry Bonds! ESPN has no shame when it comes to covering Barry, nor do most other sports news broadcasts.
Why is this? Well, because Barry Bonds was a private guy early on in his career. He didn’t do interviews. He didn’t get along with the media. He got into altercations and fights with them. SO, . now the media is using this as an excuse to demonize Barry, to get back at him.
Well, I submit to you that a scar on Barry is a scar on Baseball. Right now this man just surpassed the babe! Baseball is alive, people are watching, there’s alot of good young talent (Mets), alot of underachieving well paid talent (Yankees) but all in all, . baseball has clearly rebounded from its lockout days. MLB capitalized on the homerun race between Sammy Sosa and Mark McGuire. The Red Sox won the series, the White Sox won the series. The fans are back. So, now we have another chance to capitalize on a great achievement by a great ball player, . and all we get is mud slinging. Steroids, drugs, . illegality, attitudes and its all coming up next; on SportsCenter. After of course, the Congressional hearings. .
Mark McGuire and Sosa, used steroids I’m sure. There ain’t no way you can look at a McGuire rookie from 1985 (he looked like a coat rack) and not see a tremendous difference when he broke the single season homerun record (he looked like a tree trunk) Now, that alone does not mean he did steroids. but c’mon. He admited to using andro and Canseco said they used it in his book. Sometimes where there is smoke there is fire.
More importantly, no one was really talking about steroids back then, we were just enjoying the home run race. ” . . back , back over the left field warning track. . he got all of that one!” But now, when Mr Bonds is doing his thing, . we wanna change the game up? When he started catching up to speed, they wanna change up the tempo.
Well, MLB owners the same way that you may feel justified in the media coverage of Bonds, b/c its just “chickens coming home to roost”, is the same way I’ll feel if and when there is a backlash in Major League baseball. If Barry loses credibility then so does baseball.
So, I implore the ownership and management of baseball to prevent this from going any further. Put pressure on the major media outlets. There’s no ‘I’ in team. you guys should be in it together. Because if one guy is using steroids, then who else was. Are we gonna do a historical test of alleged steroid users before they enter Cooperstown? C’mon. And quite honestly, I don’t think that most fans even care about this stuff. They only care b/c its getting the attention. Lets face it, ticket prices are getting so expensive that the average person can’t even afford to go to a game anymore, let alone care about who’s juiced or not. MLB should, simply institute a stringent drug policy going forward, and that’s it. Let sleeping dogs of the past lie. The more skeleton’s pulled from the closet of MLB’s past the greater the chance the chickens will come home to roost for everyone.
