It turned out to be an exciting All-Star game last night, with the American League eventually emerging triumphant (again), 5-4. But of course the real story of the night was Barry Bonds, the center of attention, with his career coming to an end, chasing Hank Aaron's record, still eager to defy his critics, yet hungry for love and adulation, but...thoroughly muddied by scandal. But the big game was at his home park, and he got to start and bat second, and get the huge ovations he obviously craved. There's an excellent column on Barry and the game in today's Washington Post by its lead columnist Thomas Boswell, and he makes an excellent point: Barry Bonds isn't the only big leaguer to have done steroids. Far from it. Yet it's as if he's the visible symbol, the scapegoat, on whom everyone is taking their anger and cynicism concerning the steroid era. Maybe not completely fair but, as Boswell explains, Bonds is so flawed and inconsistent and hypocritical that it's hard to feel too sorry for him: Of course, much of the reason San Francisco sticks with Bonds is because fans here are so aware, and honest, that they were right beside Bonds, cheering and egging him on as he hit 73 home runs in 2001, won four straight MVP awards and took the Giants on a trip to the World Series. Many fans in many other cities, as well as those of us in the media who seldom raised enough Cain about the obvious cheating in the sport, find Bonds a useful target. What, we didn't notice the constant offseason transformations that allowed mature sluggers to add 20 or 30 pounds of muscle in a winter?
Bonds's curse is that, for all those fans throughout the majors who taunt him with asterisk signs and Barry BALCO banners, he's the most extreme case. Bonds is not the marginal minor leaguer who decides he needs an edge in order to make the majors or the ordinary player who craves to be a star. Bonds was a three-time MVP before he ever met Victor Conte. So the analogy is to the corporate kingpin, already enormously wealthy, who games the system to get even more filthy rich.
In the end, this All-Star Game -- on a night that baseball has dreaded all season because the sport's most notorious star would be on center-stage display -- ended as well as it could. Bonds got his cheers. And, for an indisputably great career, he deserved them. But he didn't get the home run he wanted so much with its shallow appearance of vindication. Instead, his long fly ball died at the wall, much as his quest to be seen as the game's true home run king will probably also fail as the years pass .
