Bravo, Sports Frog, for your take on Barry Bonds and the chase to hit 715 home runs. This is required reading for all you purists out there and for those of you who are ready to hit the collective body of mainstream sports media types over the head with a piece of crockery for the crock that they've dished on this "milestone." Enduring the mainstream sports media's coverage on this "milestone" has been akin to passing a kidney stone, with one key difference -- we don't have to listen to it or read it.
Period.
I remember 6-7 years ago when Mark McGwire broke Roger Maris' single-season record how we tried to be home (only to have a bad storm knock over a tree in the neighborhood that flatted a cable line that knocked our our service) to watch this monumental effort, only to question the record a week later (because of "Andro") and have my father-in-law call me a cynic for having the temerity to question the latest Bunyan-esque home run hitter. Back then, there were whispers, players were bigger, but there was no hard information.
Fast forward to today. It's been said that democracy and sausage are both great things, but you don't want to see either of them made. It probably was the case about baseball six, seven years ago, when the feats were astounding and we clearly had no clue as to how they were accomplished (thanks, in large part, to the mainstream sports media's kissing the butts of the players instead of looking a little more closely at them for needle marks or steroids-induced acne). Today, though, we know how those records were made, and the repulsion at the process caused us to take about as much interest in Barry's "assault" on the Babe's mark as we did, say, in eating a fruitcake at Christmas-time in December.
I haven't read Tim Kurkjian's piece yet, but I did hear the legendary Peter Gammons on ESPN weeks ago covering a Giants game, and his empathy for Barry Bonds' emptiness was absurd. Gammons is excellent at the game that goes on in between the lines, but he and the rest of the so-called "best" baseball writers aren't of much use to the fan about what goes on outside it.
Keep it coming, Sports Frog!
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2 comments:
>...we don't have to listen to it or read it.
And yet, you do listen to it, read it, and even write about it.
That's right, because I'm hammering home the point. These guys are supposed to be the leading writers, and, at certain levels, I have respected their work in the past. Part of the point of the blogosphere is to try to keep them honest. Whether that works or not is open to debate, but I read it because they're the main guys to read on this stuff. There aren't many alternatives, although there should be.
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