There...Is...Another....Book....
The arms race between Sports Illustrated and ESPN the Magazine heated up as ESPN the Mag took Sports Illustrated taking excerpts of the Barry Bonds bombshell book and raised them a biography of the Barry. Ha! And for those wondering why all these revelations came out around this time of the year, there you have it.
The big news concerning the ESPN book, "Love Me, Hate Me: Barry Bonds and the Making of an Antihero" by Jeff Pearlman concerns, of course, steroids. In an excerpt published in the upcoming issue and also on ESPN.com, Pearlman details a dinner conversation in amazingly Bob Woodward-esque detail between Barry and Ken Griffey Jr. at a dinner party in 1998 in which Barry says, basically, that he's going to join the juicers, not beat them. Here's the supposed quote:
"You know what...I had a helluva season last year, and nobody gave a crap. Nobody. As much as I've complained about McGwire and Canseco and all of the bull with steroids, I'm tired of fighting it. I turn 35 this year. I've got three or four good seasons left, and I wanna get paid.",
Which if true (both Griffey and Bonds denied having the conversation) makes us actually sympathetic to Barry here. Could you blame him, really? We like to think our star athletes are some sort of mythical figure, straight out of some sort of chivalrous tale from the Middle Ages, but at this point, we should know better.
Also in the excerpts are stories from little known utility guy on the 1999 Giants team, Jay Canizaro (as in who?) who also gives evidence that Barry was juicing. He also mentioned that a lot of players on the '99 team were juicing and said that the Giants had a problem with it back then. Unlike every other team in baseball at the time.
Screencap from Saturday Night Live
In other Barry news, it's pretty much as expected. The pitchfork crowd is still demanding heads, the ombudsmen at ESPN.com is calling for the killing of the reality show, and rumors still swirl that Bud might do something like suspensions or investigations or anything. None of which will probably happen. In fact, most baseball fans seem to have either moved on, or like the rest of the nation, become so engrossed in bracketology that everyone stopped caring. Baseball itself is so concerned about all this that rumors continue to swirl that Barry will be added to the U.S. teams roster at the WBC if they make it to the semi-finals because, well, because the team sucks right now (seriously- and maybe they should get Bugs Bunny too). Meanwhile, the Barry is launching moon shots left and right and once again bringing the gawking.
And finally, the comedy world seems to be having fun with all this, as the recent revelations got satirized by both SNL (which sadly can't be found online due to the stupid greed heads at NBC) and "The Daily Show". Leave it to the Onion, however, to pretty much nail the whole thing.