Barry Bonds and the 715th homer

May 30., 2006 1 Comment

I’ve been a baseball fan for as long as I can remember. Growing up my dad was always willing to talk baseball with me. We’d sit and watch games in our living room, cracking open peanut shells waiting for the swing of the bat – the half-crack-half-snap as the bat connected with the ball. My sister and her long-time boyfriend in high school bought me my first brand-new baseball mitt – a black and brown mitt with Bo Jackson’s “autograph” emblazoned on the inside in “gold” and my first baseball bat. A wooden Louisville Slugger – pine colored handle and the rest was black. My dad was gracious enough to put up with my questions of “Why” and “How” when he showed me how to properly break in a mitt.

I think most kids can remember who and when they were taught the rules of the game, how to properly swing a bat and not throw like a girl. My dad and I would play catch for hours in the street in front of our house on warm summer nights. Or down at the high school baseball diamond with my best friend. My mom couldn’t stand sports, so when my dad was going somewhere, anywhere, I’d hop in the car with my dad and we’d listen to the game on the radio. He explained and pointed out reasons why listening to games on the radio made even the boring games more enjoyable since you had to envision the action – every swing of the bat, every play, every stolen base.

I idolized the good old days of the Oakland A’s greats like Jose Canseco, Mark McGuire, and Ricky Henderson. Ricky Henderson. . . my favorite baseball player of all time. To this day, I have not been able to acquire the single baseball card that always seems to elude me, it is a photo of Ricky Henderson and Lou Brock, holding up a Second Base with the, at the time, new record number of stolen bases, when Ricky beat Lou’s record. When Dave Dravecky’s arm snapped from cancer, and he returned to the sport, and then had to leave again, my dad and I were there in line at the local bookstore when he was signing books. I only wanted to meet the guy, shake his remaining hand and tell him how much I admired him. My dad surprised me with a copy of the book so I could have his autograph. We didn’t have the money for that, looking back. But my dad knew how important it would be to me. My dad would go out of his way to go to a gas station that happened to be selling A’s pins and buy me the ones he knew I’d like best with the names of my favorite players.

My enthusiasm really got ramped up when my sister was in high school and one of her friends came to the house on weekends and such to spend the time looking through my cards with me. He would explain to me what “mint condition” was, how to determine how “mint” a card was. How to keep them protected. How to look them up in the Becket magazine to see what they were worth. I would spend my allowance on packs of Upper Deck cards at the local Lucky’s store. I would bring them home, put them on my dresser and wait. Wait out the agonizing time until he came over again. Then we’d sit on the living room couch, open the packs, and one-by-one we’d look up the cards in the current issue of Becket and see how well I did in “making my money back.”

I was ecstatic the day my mom came home from work and handed me a mint condition Will Clark rookie card, enclosed in ¼ inch of hard plastic protection, telling me her co-worker knew I’d like it.

I used to love watching pitcher Jim Abbott work his magic. Abbot only had one hand. He would put the glove on his stub, throw the ball, and before the batter could react to the ball, he would switch the glove over to his free hand.

I was a true fan, as I saw it, because while I only was lucky enough to attend 3 games growing up, in the midst of my obsession, and my team always lost, I still was a loyal Oakland A’s fan and more importantly, a fan of the sport. That is up until the great baseball strike when I was in 7th grade. I still remember the commercials of an empty baseball stadium, except for one determined fan, holding a sign with the number of days the strike had lasted in the baseball season. A year without baseball… that shook me. Call me ignorant. Call me sheltered. But it never occurred to me that these people really cared more for their money than the love of the game. They were already making more money in one season than my family did in an entire year.

Since then, I haven’t really been able to get back into the game. In the last year or so I’ve tried harder to rekindle my enthusiasm for the sport. And the more I hear about the Giants and Barry-freaking-Bonds, the more I realize how I miss those days when I was oblivious to all of the crap that the players did to tarnish the sport. Then came the steroids “scandal”. Give me a break – we all knew deep down inside players were juicing up. Many fans can stomach the cheating in the game, but I couldn’t. I still enjoy watching baseball games on TV and would go to a game every now and then. But the passion and love of the sport is gone. Players like Barry Bonds and Darrell Strawberry took that away from people like me. I didn’t like Bonds before the steroids allegations came to the surface – I didn’t like him because of his ego, and how he turned the great Giants into a team that revolved around him and his every move. He made a spectacle out of the San Francisco Giants.

And Sunday Barry Bonds hit his 715th career home run, beating Babe Ruth’s long-standing record of 714 – second only to the legendary Hank Aaron who still holds a record of 755. Lowell Cohn, Sports columnist for the Press Democrat hit the nail on the head in his column today about Bonds’ achievement:

…There’s poetic justice in the way it ended. Dave Flemming’s mike went dead, and all those people listening on KNBR didn’t hear his description of the big moment. There’s a meaning in that. And the guy who caught the ball wasn’t even watching. He was on the beer line. There’s a meaning in that, too, although on talk shows people have roasted the guy, as if he’s not a legitimate fan or a good person because he was buying beer for his wife and himself. Hey, the man paid for his ticket – he could buy beers if he wanted to.

Source: Lowell Cohn, Sports columnist, The Press Democrat