This Week in Barry: Here Comes the Judge
We're on the Other Coast this week, ensconced with family for Pesach-- that yearly holiday that celebrates our people's release from bondage and their subsequent peaceful and uneventful existence, and even though we can barely find out how the Giants are doing, it's not so difficult to see the latest in Barry news. It's a perjury investigation, baby!
Yesterday CNN reported that a federal grand jury is looking into whether Barry should be indicted for saying in the BALCO trial that he didn't knowingly and purposely do steroids when it's looking like he knowingly did a whole heaping mess of them. And this morning, the Chron (or more like SFGate since it's hard to find the Chron all the way in Baltimore) is reporting that one of Barry's knee doctors, Dr. Ting, is being called in to testify. Ting was said to have accompanied Bonds to BALCO on several occasions when Barry went in for a "check up."
And yes, the questions are out there as to why. Bonds' lawyer is calling perjury trap and bringing up Martha Stewart as an example of what's going on. We immediately thought Bill Clinton in that Clinton, like maybe Barry, got nailed for "perjury" for a question asked in an investigation that had nothing to do with the actual investigation.
Then there's the people smelling conspiracy, even from quarters usually not prone to yelling conspiracy in regards to the Barry. In short, it's just another way of the Man getting Barry down. The thought, as usual, is that if Bonds wasn't going after #756, none of this would be happening, something a lot of people have been suspecting all along. Especially as the statue of limitations in all of this has passed. As Buster Olney on ESPN the Web site writes (sorry, you need to be an ESPN Insider to read it), a perjury charge gives Bud Selig and major league baseball an opening to just asterisk the whole situation and announce that they won't officially recognize anything Barry has done.
On the other hand, Barry did lie in front of a federal grand jury. That's not good.
For the final say in all of this, we turn to Chuck Klosterman. Yes, Chuck Klosterman. Klosterman put down the bong and his "Saved by the Bell" DVDs long enough to weigh in on the whole Bonds controversy in this week's ESPN the Magazine cover story on Bonds. Since we speak Klosterman (we smoked enough dope in college to get him), we'll translate. In essence, what he's saying is that baseball has two things going for it: it's mythology and it's numbers. Take away both and baseball loses what makes it special, it's magic as it were. Bonds' attempt at the home run record and the whole steroid thing destroys both. You lose the mythology because Bonds is essentially a douche who cheated and you lose the numbers because, well, he cheated. To root for Bonds to break the record is to root for "nothing." In short, what this whole thing amounts to is one hell of an existential crisis for baseball and when the institution is threatened in such a way, the institution usually hits back. Anyways, there's much more to the essay than just that and Chuck makes some more excellent points, even tying it all into the times we live in a much better way than we could ever possibly do (something along the lines of the past five years has SUCKED and that we've all been witness to the car crash, completely unable to do anything about it) but we'll leave it up to you to read.
Finally, there's one more thing to ponder as the Giants start a new series against the Dodgers: Beat L-A! Beat L-A! Beat L-A!