BARRY BONDS did not always connect with other black players, and often was considered snobbish and completely self-absorbed. There was a moment before the 1993 All-Star Game, in Baltimore, when a group of black players that included Barry Larkin, David Justice, Marquis Grissom, Gary Sheffield, and a few others were sitting around a table talking. As Justice recalled, it was the black network keeping up with one another. San Francisco was the hottest team in baseball that summer and was leading the National League West by nearly ten games over Atlanta. Bonds walked in, and immediately zeroed in on Justice, the Braves’ right fielder. “I always liked Barry,” Justice said. “Not everybody did. I knew that he talked about himself all the time, but I didn’t care. It was just Barry being Barry. Barry walked in and started talking shit, about how we weren’t going to catch them. You know what? Within five or ten minutes, everybody at that table peeled off. It was like a cloud over his head. A lot of guys just - didn’t like Barry. He was cocky, always talking about himself, but we brothers, we have a fraternity. I mean, when was the last time you saw two brothers fighting on the field? But that day, everybody just got up and left. Nobody could stand him. But you know what? He was the truth on the baseball field.”
A former friend, Gary Sheffield, often said “Barry’s not black,” the implication being that Bonds did not live the traditional African American experience and by extension did not identify with the particular circumstances that came with being black. He attended private schools, including the legendary Serra High School, which produced football players Lynn Swann and Tom Brady and baseball players Jim Fregosi and Gregg Jeffries. After high school, Bonds did not go directly into professional baseball, but instead went to college, a route to the majors few blacks took.
It was a charge that Dusty Baker did not like. “Barry’s of two worlds,” Baker said. “Let’s not forget that he spent the summers with his grandparents and Riverside was a predominately black and Latino city. I have a lot of respect for Gary Sheffield, but you can’t fault a guy for where he’s from.”
But Sheffield did not quarrel with Bonds’s upbringing. He broke with Bonds because he believed Bonds had violated the decades-long tradition of blacks in the game looking out for other blacks. Veteran black players were supposed to be available, accessible to the next generation of black players coming through the ranks. When younger black players came to a given city for road games, the senior black players in that city were supposed to reach out. It was part of the tight black network that had existed since Jackie Robinson. Robinson was an eternal source of support for any black player struggling with the rhythms, culture, and pitfalls that came with being black in the game, and continued to be so long after his playing days ended. Robinson was the first black player in the major leagues, in 1947. When Pumpsie Green joined the Boston Red Sox in 1959, completing the integration of baseball, Robinson had already been retired for three years. Yet Pumpsie Green received a warm phone call from the legendary Robinson. Bonds saw this network of support up close with his father and Mays and Baker and Aaron. To break that chain, thought Sheffield, was to break with the greatest tradition of brotherhood among black players, for the black experience in baseball was a special one. It was a responsibility Gary Sheffield took seriously, for he understood the harder road that came with being black in the big leagues. Sheffield himself had been saddled with a reputation for being difficult, one that was born out of his natural personality, which could be intimidating. As a young player in Milwaukee, Sheffield had made a comment that insinuated he once committed an error on purpose. In 2004, as Sheffield completed his seventeenth major league season, he still hadn’t lived down the remark. Gary Sheffield moved with an unvarnished intensity, one that - could be off-putting to white executives and press. He did not flinch from racial subjects, even as his interviewers or teammates did, and he took seriously the black heritage in the game, a history he saw declining. He said what he believed and did not consider how uncomfortable his responses might be to a baseball world that was often self-satisfied. People who asked Gary Sheffield a question received a direct answer. He had earned the right of candor. “You’re not supposed to look down your nose at the guys coming up,” Sheffield said one day at Legends Field, the Yankees’ spring training home. “You’re supposed to be there for them. Once this generation of black players retires, that will be gone, because too many guys think because they make a whole lot of money, they don’t have any responsibilities to the other guys. They think its okay to look down on the guys who aren’t as fortunate.”
Sheffield believed it was his responsibility as an elite player to be outspoken on racial issues that affected black players. He understood that the black player who did not have the protection of a .300 batting average or 40 home run power could not often defend himself. The reprisals against vocal blacks were historically swift. Bonds wanted it both ways, Sheffield thought. He wanted to be heard when racial issues affected him, but on a daily basis, where reputations inside the game are made, Bonds did not pay much attention to how those same issues might have affected others around him.
“As for us, should we be surprised?” asked Dusty Baker. “Everything that we’ve been taught, whether you’re black, white, or whatever, for the past thirty years has been ‘Look out for number one.’ We don’t seem to put a premium on looking out for each other anymore.”
Yet another side of Bonds revealed a man with a great sense of the complexity and frustration that came from being black first in a contemporary society that tended to believe that money, fame, and progress had nullified the historical grievances of black Americans, and assumed that the few blacks who had achieved affluence did not experience racism. To some of the African American players around him, Bonds may have once believed that himself, but was swiftly disabused of the notion by a series of stinging racial incidents over the course of his career.
The truth was that Barry Bonds raged at the injustices he saw directed at his race and his family. He was of the black baseball aristocracy, and no one had a better view of the unfairness experienced first by his father, Mays, Robinson, and Aaron. The difference was that unlike historians, writers, and even fellow ballplayers, Barry Bonds did not have to interpret thirdhand how Willie Mays or Hank Aaron or Bobby Bonds felt about their place as black stars in baseball. Bonds heard the stories directly from the men themselves.
It was a mistake to view Bonds’s obdurate demeanor as a sign that he had not been profoundly affected by a society that was clearly racist and whose racism inflicted considerable damage on people whom Barry Bonds loved. He did not advertise his hungers, for there certainly would be no advantage in it for him, but Bonds sought redress through his play. There would come a time when he would have a chance to avenge the slights, both small and large, that had contributed to his father’s alcoholism and bitterness. To Monte Poole, when it became clear that he had an opportunity to reach the elite milestones in the game, Bonds began to sharpen his focus. His evolving black conscience paralleled his rising place in the game. He did not want to break Hank Aaron’s record, he said. What he wanted to do, he once told Poole, was to erase the white men who played in the segregated era from the top of the record books. They were leaders because they were great players, but only in part, Bonds believed. The other reason was that they did not have to compete against a significant part of the baseball-playing population. It was not lost on him that the great black players of the Negro Leagues were cheated out of their moment in history by racism, and that many white players became legends at their expense. It was also not lost on him that despite his incredible natural talents, he, too, would have been denied the opportunity to compete against the white players who would become icons had he been born in the segregated era. He was fueled to a large degree by addressing this historical racial slight.
Bonds was also driven by how baseball treated his father. Despite wonderful, revolutionary skills that should have been celebrated, Bobby Bonds endured a difficult existence in baseball. The eld
er Bonds was not only a talented player, but also a speedy power hitter, who was taken under the wing of Willie Mays while playing for the San Francisco Giants. That could only mean that Bobby Bonds had to be the next incarnation of Mays. Otherwise, he was not living up to his potential. It was a label that haunted Bobby Bonds, and in a sense was used as a convenient excuse to treat him rather shabbily. He was a leadoff hitter, and his power gave a new dimension to the position. He was the first leadoff man to hit 30 homers and steal 30 bases in the same season, and just the fourth player ever to achieve the feat (following Mays, Aaron, and the Browns’ Ken Williams). After seven seasons with the Giants in which he hit 186 home runs, stole 263 bases, and outproduced the average right fielder in nearly every offensive category, Bonds would never again know stability. Beginning in 1975, after the Giants had traded him to the Yankees, until the end of his career in 1982, Bonds played for seven teams in seven seasons. He would produce well and suddenly find himself expendable.
To Barry Bonds as well as many black players of his father’s era, Bobby Bonds’s changing teams so often was immediately attributable to race. A player as talented and versatile as Bobby Bonds would certainly have been treated with more dignity had he been white, Barry told intimates. The league simply did not appear to be ready for him. The press was suspicious of him, unable to gauge him as a person. That is not to say that the majority of writers tried. Bobby Bonds, like his son, would be fiercely independent and not easily describable. There were lessons about race that Barry Bonds would learn himself as he ascended in baseball, but the first one came by watching what baseball did to his father, about the price a strong black personality paid in a game that did not encourage independence.
When Barry Bonds became a great player, he was not unaware that his family’s place in baseball, the part that really mattered, was unassailable. Yet during the 1990s, when Bonds had already been a three-time MVP and had clearly solidified himself as one of the top players of his time, he saw his father struggling to remain a coach with the Giants. That the father was never properly celebrated bore a hole through the son. He also bristled that the celebration of the game’s generations did not include him and his father. The truth was that there was no greater father-son combination than Bobby and Barry Bonds. He was aware of the slight early, and before the 1990 playoffs began, Bonds revealed his vulnerable underbelly.
“You hear all this talk about Ken Griffey Jr. and his father, and the Ripkens. But they haven’t done anything compared to us. It’s crazy. It’s almost like my father is finally getting the recognition now because of my accomplishments, and that hurts me. My dad is regarded as one of the greatest players in the game. He should be in the Hall of Fame. What Ken Griffey’s done, what Cal Ripken’s done, that’s nothing. We’re in the history books, man, for the first father-son to crack 30-30 . . . they never did my dad right. They never gave him the respect he deserves. Why should I believe things will be any different for me?”
Fueled by these slights, Barry Bonds set out not only to fulfill his greatness but to do it a certain way. He played and spoke with a sense of grievance that was taken more as arrogance and less as what it really was, the manifestation of a driven personality to a large extent created by baseball’s historical callousness toward Bobby Bonds and the black players who came before him. Rarely did Barry Bonds speak about race, for he understood that the hero game worked both ways. So he kept his feelings contained, using his talent to create that distance from certain aspects of the game as well as the public. No player was more of baseball than Bonds, and yet no other player chose not to play along with its hypocrisies. In a way, it made sense that a black player would be the one to throw the false give-and-take with the public and the writers into the garbage. The writers didn’t understand him, anyway. When he was a young player, he tried to cultivate them and they responded by mangling his words. It was then that he made the fundamental decision that anything outside of playing the game of baseball was not going to matter to him.
Bonds went through the decade consistently dominant, amassing staggering numbers, yet paying a price for his freedom. For despite his brilliance, something remarkable happened: The game started having fun without him. The best player in the game was not its most celebrated. Bonds may have been the best player in the National League, but he nevertheless seemed to be diminished by the home run fiesta that took place in the poststrike years. While Bonds smoldered, the story was Sammy Sosa and Mark McGwire. To Jon Heyman, watching Sosa and McGwire led Bonds to a fateful choice to transform himself into an incredible hulk of a baseball player, which led him eventually to use steroids. “I think he got mad when he saw lesser players like Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa getting all the attention, and he said to himself, ‘Let’s level the playing field,’” Heyman said. “And when he leveled the playing field he realized he was two times better than everyone else. He literally became twice as good as anyone else playing baseball.”
AT THE beginning of the 2000 season, Barry Bonds was in a place familiar to most thirty-five-year-old athletes. It looked as if his body was beginning to crumble. The 1999 season had been particularly rough on him. He reported to spring training and immediately began suffering from back spasms. Before the first month of the season was over, Bonds was in a cast, scheduled to miss two and a half months rehabilitating from elbow surgery. He suffered through his worst season in San Francisco. His power numbers were good, 34 home runs and a .617 slugging percentage, yet he hit just .262 and saw his on-base percentage dip below .400 for the first time since the eighties. More than any other statistic, Barry Bonds’s not being on the field was the most telling. He had played in a mere 102 games in 1999, his lowest total since 1989, when he was in his fourth season, still batting leadoff for Pittsburgh, and had yet to become the feared Barry Bonds. He had been durable throughout his career, playing in 888 of 908 possible games as a member of the Giants before undergoing knee and wrist surgery in 1999. In six seasons with the Giants, Bonds had never been on the disabled list, and yet was shelved twice in 1999. Bonds rebounded in 2000 to play in 143 games and hit a career-high 49 home runs.
During those two seasons, there was something about Bonds that was remarkably different. He was gigantic. During the first day of spring training in 1999, Charlie Hayes walked by Bonds and did a double take. Hayes strolled past a group of reporters and said, “Did you see my man? He was huge.” Bonds said he feared what age would do to his body, and began a weight-training program to stay fit. For a player who was always muscular but never massive, the Bonds transformation was consistent with the era. Mark McGwire in 1999 dwarfed his Oakland self. In Chicago, the Sammy Sosa who was lean and strong and could run and had an arm like Clemente had disappeared, replaced by a thick, blocky slugger. Bonds looked like a different person.
THE 2001 season was special from the very start. On Opening Day, Bonds hit a solo home run off San Diego’s Woody Williams, who would later intentionally walk him. For the next few years, these two categories, home runs and intentional walks, would stand as the primary evidence of his greatness. Ten days later, Bonds hit another solo shot against the Padres. It was the first of six straight games in which he would homer and the beginning of a stretch in which he would hit 13 home runs in twenty games. In May, he would enjoy another streak of six straight games with a home run, which included a three-game series in Atlanta in which he hit 6 home runs. In the middle game of that series, Bonds hit 3 home runs off three different pitchers. By the end of May, Bonds had 27 home runs.
The Atlanta series was an important moment, as the light bulb went on for the rest of the league: Bonds was on pace to surpass McGwire. In a way it wasn’t surprising—he was, after all, the best player in the game, and for a player of his caliber, anything was possible. There was also a feeling of magic surrounding Bonds. Earlier in the season he hit the 500th home run of his career and it was clear to his teammates that Bonds had begun that same march that Mark McGwire embarked upon two years earlier, on which it s
eemed each home run passed another of the game’s icons. Roger Clemens was in the process of doing the same with the Yankees in the American League, each strikeout reviving another name from the game’s past.
As the home runs continued, a new phenomenon began to engulf Bonds: He seemed warmer, more acceptable. In Atlanta, he received a standing ovation for hitting a home run. In other cities, as his intentional walk totals not only increased but began to take on a ridiculous quality (he would finish the season with the fifth-highest single-season total of all time), the fans would boo the home team for walking Bonds. On June 23, Bonds hit his 39th home run, which, despite a subsequent fourteen-game dry spell, would be the most ever at the All-Star break. At one point, he was on pace to hit 86 home runs, but he was not alone. Sosa was on pace to hit 60 home runs for the third time in four seasons, and Luis Gonzalez of Arizona, the Giants’ rival in the National League West that year, who had never hit more than 27 in a season, had 35 home runs at the break.
The cold stretch came. At one point in July, Bonds had hit three home runs in his last twenty-five games, making his pursuit of McGwire once more suspenseful. In August, he warmed again, hitting homers virtually - every other day. On August 23, he hit a pinch-hit home run in the top of the ninth to beat Montreal. It was his 55th homer of the year. He was on pace for 70, but perhaps more. In 1998, McGwire had 55 homers on September 1. Bonds was ahead of that pace by nine days.
As his onslaught continued, Bonds began to appear friendlier, more open to enjoying a season that seemed to be shaping up to be a historic one. The month of September would be remarkable, for Bonds was in the process of doing what McGwire thought could not be done. The era was also reaching a saturation point, for it looked as if both Sammy Sosa and Luis Gonzalez would also reach 60 homers. In no previous season had three players hit 60 home runs.
Juicing the Game Page 45