Neyer article

[Punch and Judy Garland]

His feelings about Bonds are refreshing for a columnist. In addition-his remarks about the congressional hearings were in line with my views. I too though that Congree got more or less a free pass when they often looked like they hadn't done their homework

 

OK, now I'm mad.

 

Maybe I'm too wrapped up in the numbers, but I've never been one to harbor "feelings" about a player, one way or the other. Occasionally, after I've written something negative about a particular player's performance or abilities, some fan of that player will write me and ask, "Why do you have something personal against [for example] Darin Erstad? Did he blow you off in an interview or something?"

 

Fortunately, no. I've been blown off by two players – Dennis Springer and Mark Mulder – and both times I deserved it. And even if I didn't, I wouldn't hold it against them, because talking to jerks with tape recorders must get old in a hurry. I consider myself an imposition, occasionally necessary only for the support of me and my family, and the occasional edification of my readers. So I sympathize with players who don't like talking to reporters, and I'd never hold it against them.

 

That doesn't mean I have to have neutral feelings toward every player, though. And though I've never been within 50 feet of Barry Bonds, I feel that now, after seeing his brief interview on TV the other day, I know him well enough to dislike him.

 

As Bonds sat down to talk, a clutch of reporters clustered around him. There was a TV camera there, too. And what Bonds said to the cameraman, before making any statement or answering any question, tells us something fundamental about his psyche.

 

"Can you show my son in this, too?" he asked, as the cameraman widened his (and our) view. "So you can see … the pain you're causing my whole family?"

 

And there sat 15-year-old Nikolai Bonds, head bowed and presumably wishing a hole in the earth would swallow him up. Nikolai's dad is fighting a war with the media, which of course has caused all his problems. And while fighting this war, instead of standing in front of his family, or beside his family, he's apparently decided to establish a defensive position behind his family. This is the reaction of a man who's really just a boy, emotionally. Bonds is dealing with a lot of problems right now – all of them, with the possible exception of his knee injuries, self-inflicted – and so he's doing what almost any adolescent would do: blaming everybody but himself. It would be funny if we didn't have to watch him take his children down with him.

 

Over at Salon, my colleague King Kaufman's take, as usual, is right on the money. My only quibble with King might be his conclusion: "But blaming the media for your troubles: That's the last refuge of a scoundrel."

 

Actually, blaming the media is just one refuge of a scoundrel. It's not the last, though. Sometimes the media deserves some blame. Not often, and not nearly as often as athletes and politicians want you to believe. But sometimes. No, the last refuge of a scoundrel is dragging your family into whatever problems you've created for yourself. That's what Barry Bonds did, and will continue to do. That's why I don't like him, and that's why I hope he doesn't break any more records.

 

Let me be clear about something, though: I will not let my personal feelings about Bonds get in the way of my evaluation of him as a player. I believe, right now, that he's one of the five greatest players ever, and that someday perhaps we'll reasonably conclude that he's actually the greatest. Today, though, it's hard to take a lot of pleasure in knowing I was here to watch him.

 

************

 

On a related note, I've had a week to consider the congressional hearings last week, and yesterday I finally finished watching all of the testimony. My conclusion? Collectively, our elected representatives are incompetent, and individually most of them aren't fit to run a Dairy Queen in the Sahara.

 

I'll give Congress this, though: They did something I didn't think was possible – make Bud Selig, Rob Manfred, and Donald Fehr look like sympathetic characters. Since last Thursday, I've heard from a lot of folks that "Baseball looked bad," but I just don't get that, at all. Nobody looked particularly good, but if I were ranking the participants in "looking bad," my list would look something like this:

 

1. Congress

 

2. Mark McGwire

 

3. Jose Canseco

 

4. Major League Baseball

 

Most of the participating congressmen were either ill-prepared, pointlessly hostile, or both. Mark McGwire essentially admitted that he'd broken Roger Maris' record with the help of performance-enhancing drugs, most likely illegal. Jose Canseco, who in his book suggests that every person on earth should embrace the wonders of steroids, testified that steroids are awful and should be erased from all sports. Some observers have professed to being charmed by Canseco, I suppose because he sometimes comes across as a naïf among sophisticates. I'm simply disgusted by him. The representatives of Major League Baseball, on the other hand – and here I'm talking about Selig, Manfred, Fehr and Sandy Alderson – seemed smart, well prepared, and (I can't believe I'm writing these words) both reasonable and honest.

 

Three years ago, when Commissioner Selig testified in Washington about MLB's (supposed) plans for contraction, I wrote a long column enumerating what I thought were his lies. He called me on the phone, told me how wrong I was, and I still didn't believe a word he said. So I can't say I was expecting a great deal of veracity during his latest trip to Capitol Hill. But this time Selig told the truth (or mostly the truth). You know how you can tell? When Selig's lying, he uses the words "frankly" and "perfectly frank" and "candidly" a lot. Like a lot of people, Selig often says the opposite of what he means.

 

But by my count, Selig used those words exactly three times during his testimony last week, and two of those came while he was expressing a reasonable opinion (that a lifetime suspension levied for a first offense might be too harsh). And while I can't vouch for the truth of every single word that passed his lips, generally his answers struck me as reasonable and, yes, candid.

 

I've never been a fan of Donald Fehr, either. But he too seemed honest, thoughtful, and reasonable. Which isn't to suggest that he's thrilled with drug testing; he and his clients fought it for years. But my opinion is that Selig and Fehr should be applauded for changing, in mid-stream, the drug policy. And getting it done fairly quickly, too. The congressmen's chief complaint against MLB seemed to be that this new policy 1) still isn't strict enough, and 2) should already be in place.

 

As for 1) we'll see, and as for 2) gosh, it's almost funny to see Congress criticizing two powerful organizations for not getting something important finished within two or three months.

 

Should Major League Baseball and the Major League Baseball Players Association have done something about PEDs a long time ago? Of course. Should PEDs have been at the top of the list when the owners and the players negotiated their new collective bargaining agreement in 1994 and 1995? Of course not. At that point, there was little sense that steroids were a significant problem; there were certainly rumors about a few players, but were those rumors worth adding one more divisive item to the agenda, with one World Series already canceled?

 

It's the players who were using PEDs, and the players who fought against testing for PEDs. Yet when Congress had the players in front of them, they asked very few tough questions (but did ask for autographs when beyond the reach of cameras). It's good to know that neither Frank Thomas nor Curt Schilling nor Rafael Palmeiro nor Sammy Sosa has ever used PEDs, and that all of them are only too thrilled to do anything possible to educate our children about the evils of PEDs. But these are all superstars, among the biggest names in the game for many years now. So where were they in the 1990s? What Congress doesn't seem to understand is that for at least the last couple of decades, the players have, collectively, essentially functioned as co-commissioner of Major League Baseball. So while it's easy to blame the old guys wearing the suits, it's appropriate to also blame the young guys wearing the uniforms.