Juicing the Game

by Howard Bryant

  “Barry Bonds is on another planet,” said Beane. “He’s so much better than the next closest player that you could legitimately pay him $50 million a year and it would be a bargain.” Not only was Bonds the single most valuable player in baseball, Beane thought, but there was no second. He stood in a league of one. “Bonds is so good,” Buster Olney said, “that now I have an idea of what it must have been like watching Ruth.”

  BARRY LAMAR Bonds was born on July 28, 1964, in Riverside, California, and while his skills would one day be heralded as extraordinary, what separated him from every other player in the history of the game was his baseball lineage. A unique figure in the history of the game, Bonds was third-generation black baseball royalty. His father was Bobby Bonds, who combined exceptional speed and power to become one of the most gifted five-tool players of the 1970s. With the Giants from 1968 to 1972, Bobby Bonds was mentored by his legendary teammate Willie Mays, who in turn became young Barry’s godfather. Growing up in Riverside, Bobby Bonds was a childhood friend of Dusty Baker. Baker’s father coached young Bobby through Little League. Like Bonds with Mays on the Giants, Dusty Baker, as a young outfielder with the Atlanta Braves, was mentored by the great Hank Aaron. As contemporaries of Jackie Robinson, Mays and Aaron were two of the most prominent forefathers of integrated baseball. As a child, Barry Bonds learned baseball directly from his father, Willie Mays, and Hank Aaron. No black player of Bonds’s generation would own such a personal connection to the roots of the integrated era, nor would any of his contemporaries be more closely linked to the major league black experience.

  Not only did Barry Bonds grow up in the game of baseball, but his experience was not unlike that of a privileged member of a political dynasty. When Bobby Bonds played for the Yankees in 1975, Billy Martin, then the manager, would constantly have to run the eleven-year-old Barry off the field during batting practice. Years later, after Bonds signed a record-breaking contract to join the San Francisco Giants, his on-field performance would help Dusty Baker become the most influential and successful African American manager in baseball history. Baker would be Bonds’s manager for his first ten years with the Giants. Baker’s hitting coach for the first four of those years would be Bobby Bonds.

  It was almost as if Barry Bonds were destined to become not only a big league baseball player, but an elite, important one. His life was like something out of a movie. His mother, Pat, recalled that, even as a boy growing up in San Carlos, a suburb thirty minutes south of San Francisco, Barry was such a devastating hitter that she was a regular at W. J. Bank, the local glass store downtown. She replaced so many windows from Barry’s hitting that if she went longer than six months without stopping by, someone from the store would call the Bonds house. “They’d say, ‘You haven’t needed any glass lately, Mrs. Bonds.’ And I’d say, ‘No, but I’m sure I will soon.’”

  Barry Bonds excelled at every level. In his three years on the Serra High School varsity baseball team he hit .404, after which he was a second-round pick of the Giants in the amateur draft. Bonds chose college instead and became a legendary performer for three years at Arizona State, twice guiding his team to the College World Series while hitting .347 for his college career. He was then drafted by Pittsburgh in the first round of the 1985 draft and, from the start, was forecast to be a great major league player. Bonds had adored his father and idolized Mays since he was a child and would always say he didn’t just want to play baseball, but wanted to play it a certain way, in the mold of his father and of Mays. In Pittsburgh, he even chose Mays’s number 24.

  AS A major leaguer, Bonds’s battles with the press were legendary. He had inherited from his father a suspicion of the writers that was tied to a large degree to race. During his playing days, Bobby Bonds suffered through a difficult relationship with the writers and team executives, and he often warned his son to be cautious of the press. There would always be a distance between the players and the writers, he would say. Part of it is inevitable; it is your job to play, and their job to judge. But while the writers should be treated with respect first, Bobby Bonds believed, very few could be trusted.

  To Bobby Bonds, what made the relationship especially volatile was the element of race. The overwhelming majority of the writers were white, and very few seemed willing to take the time to understand the special circumstances that existed for black players. In a sense, the relationship was no different from the black-white relationships that existed in the society at large. There was a certain unfairness to it, but that made it no less true: Whites could live their entire lives and never know or care to know anyone black. Yet it was impossible for a black person to be successful in America without knowing how to deal with whites and navigate the white world. As a result, there was a critical imbalance to the way white reporters would interpret the actions and personalities of black players that made it a virtual certainty that the black athlete would be portrayed inaccurately, if not unfairly. There was, especially when Bobby Bonds played, a type of conduct white reporters expected from black athletes. As much as the black player who was generally outgoing would receive fairly favorable coverage, the black player who showed any type of independence or intensity was met with an almost open hostility from the white press corps. There were a few reporters who would take the time to be fair, but most would not, and because they were the primary liaison between the player and the public (not to mention their connections to the upper reaches of club management), the writers could make life very difficult for a black player.

  Despite his father’s warning, as he emerged as first a good player and then a potentially great one, Barry Bonds attempted to be accommodating. In those early years, he was affable, insightful, and considerably introspective when dealing with the press. To the men and women who covered him, however, the Pittsburgh years shaped the Barry Bonds who would make for a formidable interview.

  If it seemed that Pittsburgh would have been the perfect place for Bonds, appearances were quite deceiving. It was true that with the exception of St. Louis in the 1960s, Pittsburgh was the one organization that gravitated toward players of color. The Pirates of the 1970s were the most integrated team in baseball, combining the talents of Phil Garner, Richie Hebner, Tim Foli, Steve Blass, and Kent Tekulve with those of Roberto Clemente, Willie Stargell, Manny Sanguillen, Al Oliver, Dock Ellis, Bill Madlock, Dave Parker, and Bill Robinson. They were also successful, winning their division in five out of six seasons from 1970 to 1975, and winning the World Series in 1971 and 1979. The Pirates also had a recent tradition of embracing black players as the face of their organization. It had begun with the great Roberto Clemente, who was a black Puerto Rican, and continued through the 1970s with Willie Stargell. Nicknamed “Pops,” Stargell became the father figure of the 1979 World Championship team best remembered for their disco rallying cry, Sister Sledge’s “We Are Family.” From the outside, Bonds’s arrival in Pittsburgh in the mid-1980s, especially coupled with the Pirates’ resurgence in the early 1990s, seemed the perfect marriage.

  Pittsburgh, however, was not as racially harmonious as its ballclub. It was more emblematic of the traditional blue-collar eastern city. For all the winning and multiculturalism on the field, the Pirates were never a big draw. From 1970 until 1979, the Pirates finished as low as third just once yet were never better than a middling team in terms of attendance, never surpassing twenty thousand fans per game in any single season during the decade despite playing in a stadium that held nearly forty-eight thousand. Clemente became an iconic figure after his tragic death in a plane crash on New Year’s Eve 1972, but for years his pride had been wounded because he wasn’t accepted as he believed a player of his talents should have been. It was a slight that defined Clemente’s world view as much as his determined play. Stargell was truly a signature figure in Pittsburgh, but his way was more relaxed, less edgy, and easier for the average white customer to accept. As was the case in most cities, white fans and press tended to have a much more difficult time decoding a complicate
d black athlete.

  Things only got worse for black players in Pittsburgh following the cocaine scandal of the early 1980s, which centered mostly on Pittsburgh and Kansas City and involved many black players, including Pittsburgh’s Dave Parker, who suffered a steep decline in his production before departing as a free agent after the 1983 season. At the time of Bonds’s arrival in 1986, there was a feeling that the city was in the throes of a backlash.

  To Bonds, Pittsburgh was a city that craved white stars, and it galled him that white players of lesser ability were granted special dispensation. It was a racial double standard that tore at him at every level he had played. When the Pirates finally returned to the playoffs in 1990 and Bonds won his first Most Valuable Player award, it was clear to him that merit only went so far. White players were more accepted not only by the Pittsburgh fans, but also by management and the press. In Pittsburgh, he referred to center fielder Andy Van Slyke, a talented but inferior player whose popularity far outstripped his ability, as “The Great White Hope.” Van Slyke, Bonds believed, could do no wrong with either the Pirates organization or the overwhelmingly white Pirates fan base. It was a bitter reality to an athlete as proud and driven as Bonds. “Mr. Pittsburgh,” Bonds said mockingly of his teammate one day. “Anyone touches Van Slyke on this club and he gets released.” Led by the killer B’s, Barry Bonds and Bobby Bonilla, the Pirates of the early 1990s were perhaps the most talented young team in baseball, and like their predecessors, they did not draw. They won 95 games in 1990, 98 in 1991, and 96 in 1992, winning their division each year, but never averaged more than twenty-six thousand fans per game.

  Those Pirates were a great, but not particularly deep, team. After the 1991 and ’92 seasons, their stars, Bonds, Bonilla, and pitcher Doug Drabek, were due to become free agents and earn significant contracts. The Pirates, struggling to compete financially, knew they could not pay all three players and eventually lost all of them to free agency. The situation of Pittsburgh, an original member of the National League resigned to being a small-market team unable to retain its best players when their salary demands rose, was one of the sober financial realities that drove both the disastrous owner summit at Kohler and the 1994 player strike. The Pirates, fighting for survival, were one of the most hawkish teams pushing for a salary cap.

  Bonds was a dazzling young player, who in winning the 1990 MVP award was the first player in baseball history to hit .300, score and drive in 100 runs, hit 30 home runs, and steal 50 bases all in the same season. He was living up to everything forecast for him. That sort of production combined with Gold Glove defense (he won the award eight times from 1990 to 1998) meant he was playing the all-around game on a level that only his godfather Willie Mays once had. As a result, Bonds, along with Jose Canseco and a young center fielder who played for Seattle named Ken Griffey Jr., was recognized as one of the most complete players in baseball.

  In 1990, Canseco signed the richest contract in baseball history, but Pittsburgh continually balked at Bonds’s salary demands. Arguing over money became a yearly ritual. For three consecutive years, Bonds and the Pirates would enter into salary arbitration, a contentious process whereby a player and his club take their respective cases, and salary demands, to an independent arbitrator, who, bound by the rules of the collective-bargaining agreement, cannot split the difference between the two figures, but must chose one over the other. The result was a bitter and dangerous proceeding in which a club was forced to argue that its best player did not deserve the salary he had requested. Arbitration was the battleground where hard feelings surfaced.

  Barry Bonds would lose his arbitration hearing every year from 1990 to 1992, and his relationship with Pirates ownership soured. Bonds would be a free agent after the 1992 season and told the team that he wanted a multiyear contract worth $4 million per season. The Pirates rejected that, too. During the 1992 season, his last with Pittsburgh before free agency, Bonds said he wouldn’t re-sign with the Pirates for $100 million, a position that began to turn the city against him.

  The constant disputes over salary heightened tensions between Bonds and team management. The most famous incident occured during spring training of 1991, after Bonds had lost in arbitration to Pirates management for the second time. During a drill with Pirates instructor Bill Virdon, Bonds made a wisecrack that Virdon, a thirty-year baseball man, did not like. The two got into a shouting match and Jim Leyland, the Pirates manager, raced out to meet Bonds and berated him in front of reporters and news cameras. “One player’s not going to run this club. If you don’t want to be here, get the hell out of here,” Leyland shouted. “If guys don’t want to be here, if guys aren’t happy with their money, don’t take it out on someone else.”

  It was an embarrassing moment, one that Bonds later regretted. Leyland had been Bonds’s only manager at the big league level and Bonds had been fond of him. Leyland was a tough, chain-smoking man who had started his managerial career in the minor leagues in 1971, but he had a genuine affection for Bonds and appreciated his potential as a player.

  As his relationship with Pittsburgh disintegrated, on a few occasions Bonds sought to explain himself. Each time, he found himself caught in the trap his father had warned him about years earlier. “If I’m quiet and don’t talk, then I’m sulky and moody, but when I do say something, it’s not written the way that I say it, then all of a sudden it’s said I’m talking too much,” Bonds once said. “I don’t know where the medium is. I hope someone will come up to me and let me know, because then I will know what direction to go.

  “I don’t wake up in the morning and say, ‘Oh, boy, this is a great day to be a total ass. My problem is that I haven’t found that diplomatic middle ground, and I’m not blaming people for it. What I’m saying is that it’s half their fault and half my fault. A lot of times I can come across as a bad person. But a lot of times it’s because I’m doing things that get Barry Bonds prepared for the game. I wake up in the morning, play with my kids all day, then I go to the ballpark, find out who’s pitching, then work myself up, in anger, thinking I want that pitcher. Then guys will come around me, I’ll say, ‘Leave me alone,’ and all of a sudden it’s, ‘What’s your problem? Every single day you come in mad.’ Then, on the days I come in laughing, then it’s, ‘You’re not applying yourself,’ or, ‘How come you’re not focused?’ I don’t understand it. Certain people can basically say what they want and get away with it; they have that ability. Some of us don’t. I guess I’m one of the people that don’t have that ability.”

  Bonds was aware of his place in the game as well as the stinging fact that white players would always be afforded certain allowances by the fans and press that black players would never attain. Even worse for someone as confident as Bonds was the belief held by most black players that in order to become beloved, a black player would have to act like a clown, someone less serious, less professional, and more forgiving of whites. He had learned from his father’s example that baseball was not quite interested in a serious and intense black player.

  When Bonilla, one of Bonds’s closest friends, returned to Pittsburgh for the first time in 1992 after signing a lucrative contract with the New York Mets, the Pirates fans showered him with boos, debris, and obscenity. The anger of the Pittsburgh fans toward Bonilla was palpable, making for a legitimately dangerous situation. The common thought was that Bonilla was the victim of a backlash for signing a $29-million contract. “Don’t kid yourself that it’s about money,” Bonds said. “It’s a black thing.”

  Years later, when he was clearly the best player in the National League, if not in baseball, a poll in San Francisco reported that if one of the two had to be traded for financial reasons, Giants fans would have rather the team kept third-baseman Matt Williams and traded Bonds. “I don’t know if he was hurt by that, but you figure he would have to be,” said one National League player. “He’s the best player in the game and the fans would rather trade him and keep a player who was not nearly the player he is. It woul
d have to get to you, and I think Barry made it a point not to let people get close to him at all.” Giants general manager Brian Sabean offered his opinion on the matter by trading Williams to Cleveland after the 1996 season.

  After Bonds’s last year in Pittsburgh, some of the reporters who covered him thought he had given up on trying to communicate with the media. His father was right. The writers were going to say what they wanted to. They weren’t going to take the time to understand him because they had already chosen the side of management. The stalemate would grow over the next decade and a half into open warfare. In his first year in San Francisco, Sports Illustrated put him on the cover, with the headline, “I’m Barry Bonds and You’re Not.” The article savaged Bonds. He did not speak to the magazine for seven years.