America waits with jeers and gibes to catch slugger breaking a record, By: Tim Reid
Barry Bonds, one of the most controversial sportsmen in America, was poised last night to equal baseball’s hallowed home-run record, but amid allegations of steroid abuse and surrounded by a freakish circus of jeering fans and souvenir hunters.
When Bonds passes the 755 home run total set by Hank Aaron 31 years ago, possibly this weekend, it should be a moment of exultation for millions of baseball fans and joy for the man who last season passed Babe Ruth’s 714 “homers”. Instead, with allegations of steroid use overshadowing his every move and many fans convinced that he has cheated his way to one of American sport’s most sacred milestones, the “Barry Bonds Homerun Roadshow” has turned into a farcical and often ugly spectacle.
Baseball, described as the “national pastime”, has been played in America since the early 1800s. Even more than cricket it is a game not just of sporting contest but of statistics. Numerical facts and data are in many ways the sport’s lifeblood and millions of followers are obsessive statisticians.
Since Wednesday, with Bonds’s San Francisco Giants playing three games at the stadium of the LA Dodgers, their arch-rivals, thousands of hostile fans have jeered and shouted obscenities as he took the batting plate, some holding abusive signs.
Worse for Bonds, Aaron himself, a fellow African American whose chase for Babe Ruth’s home-run record in 1974 was marred by racial abuse and bigotry, has made it clear that he believes Bonds has used steroids and refuses to be present when his record is broken.
In an excruciating piece of timing the LA Dodgers held their Steroids Awareness Day on Thursday. At one event, attended by 100 Little Leaguers, the first question asked by 11-year-old Danny Casas was: “Do you think Barry Bonds took steroids?”
Even Bud Selig, the commissioner of Major League Baseball, equivocated before agreeing to attend Bonds’s games over the past week. He will continue to attend them this weekend and next week so that he is on hand when the record is reached, but has not spoken to Bonds.
But despite their hostility, the opposition fans still know a fantastic business opportunity when they see one: the chance to catch Bonds’s 755th and 756th home-run balls. The one that equals Aaron’s record could be worth $75,000 (£37,000), experts say; the one that surpasses it $500,000.
So at every Giants game since Bonds hit his 754th home run eight days ago fans have packed the right-field pavilion, baseball mitts on, hoping to pluck the left-hander’s next home-run balls from the sky.
On Wednesday night at Dodger Stadium, J. P. Espejo, an opposing fan, said that he suspected Bonds was a cheat but that it didn’t affect his desire to catch the ball. If he did he would use it to pay off his mortgage.
When Bonds hit his single-season record 73rd home run in 2001, one man gloved the ball before another emerged clutching it. The two spent a year in court fighting over ownership. They were eventually ordered to split the profits 50-50. The ball was sold at auction for $450,000.
Bonds is such a powerful slugger that his home runs frequently clear arenas altogether. When he returns to the San Francisco Giants stadium on Monday — the one place in America where he is still treated as a hero — McCovey Cove, behind the stadium’s right field, will be filled with canoeists. Several have fished Bonds’s home-run balls out of the water in recent years.
When Bonds, 43, entered Major League baseball in 1986, he was 6ft 1in and 185lb. But after an off-season of training in 2000 with Greg Anderson and Victor Conte — both later indicted for providing steroids to a string of athletes — Bonds emerged 18lb heavier to hit the 73 single-season home run record.
In 2003 Anderson, a childhood friend of Bonds, was indicted for supplying anabolic steroids to athletes, including a number of baseball players, at a time when there was no mandatory testing in the game. Bonds declared his innocence, attributing his changed physique and increased power to diet and exercise. But suspicion intensified when Bonds admitted before a grand jury that Anderson had given him a rubbing balm and liquid that he said was arthritis cream and flaxseed oil.
Many believe both substances were steroids. In 2005 Anderson and Conte struck a deal with prosecutors that did not require them to reveal the names of athletes who might have used banned drugs. Bonds has never tested positive.
