Lousy with Baseball Talk

There are two things I can’t believe I haven’t found time to talk about yet. One would be the amazing concerts I’ve been to the past few weeks and the other is the new baseball season. Today I’ll talk about baseball.


The Braves have been puzzling so far this season. Not a single one of their starters has a win yet and the team has allowed more runs than any other team in baseball. That’s certainly not like the Braves. They have also scored more runs than any other team in baseball and have done so by hitting well with men in scoring position. That’s also not like the Braves. They have definite problems to solve but I have reason to believe they will solve them soon enough. I just hope the Mets don’t run away with it before we right the ship.


Former Major Leaguer, Darren Daulton is making the rounds on TV sports shows. He’s talking about the nature of being, skipping through time, talking to lizards, and other such things that are usually brought on by LSD experimentation, but Darren isn’t doing acid. He’s just spouting out what he believes. I feel sorry for him not because he’s saying these things or believing them, but because people in baseball will shun him. Baseball folks will put up with a lot of crap while you are still a productive and active player, but because he’s no longer in the game he’ll probably become a punch line inside baseball. But on the bright side I have Darren Daulton on my Metaphysics Fantasy Team.


Last month when Sports Illustrated broke the news about the new book Game of Shadows: Barry Bonds, BALCO, and the Steroid Scandal That Rocked Professional Sports I was incredibly amused. Not by the details of the book which I don’t think anyone should find surprising, but by the fact that Sports Illustrated broke the story. It is one thing to scoop ESPN, the world-wide leader in sports on a big sports story, but it’s another thing all together to scoop them on Barry Bonds. After all, ESPN has a fulltime Barry Bonds reporter in Pedro Gomez. I thought it must be really rough for them to be so openly embarrassed like that. Then when the story was a big deal on the network evening newscasts and ESPN still didn’t do anything with it, I knew something else was up. That something else turns out to be Bonds on Bonds, a pseudo-documentary, reality, behind-the-scenes, fluff piece that is airing weekly on ESPN. This show has aired twice now. I haven’t watched it. I don’t plan on watching it either. My mind was made up about Barry Bonds a long time ago. He is one of the best baseball players ever. He could have retired before he started hitting homeruns at a beyond-historic rate, and I think he’d still belong in the Hall of Fame. The man is good at what he does. That being said, he seems to be an asshole. Incredibly gifted people, whether it is in athletics, academics, or the arts, tend to have extreme personalities. They are either jerks, crazies, introverts, or some combination of all of those qualities. Doesn’t make them any less talented in their respective fields, it just makes them difficult to handle. I don’t need to like Barry Bonds to appreciate his talent. A lot of people do though. Also, a lot of people like to pretend they didn’t know Barry Bonds was on something the past 6 or 7 years. That’s just naiveté. However, Major League Baseball’s role in this cannot be chalked up to naiveté. They are just as complicit as the players who juiced up and an investigation is not going to solve anything. We’ll see how it all plays out this year.