The Bonds Conundrum

By Matt "The Stat" Himelfarb
Posted Tuesday, March 18, 2008

Back in the day (and by that I mean a little less than a year ago) when I used to run my blog, “Cyclones Nation,” which was mostly a Mets minor league blog with a Cyclones tilt, I usually found myself a bit scrapped for material to blog about, and would find myself pouring through those long Baseball American Chats looking for something to rip someone else on.

Well, my time-wasting habit paid off last week, when John Young of Shea Nation dropped an atomic bomb on the closeted, supposedly professional, grammatically-incorrect laden echelon of Mets Blog with this tidbit wonder when asked about Barry Bonds possibly joining the Mets: “That name should no longer be connected to the Mets for obvious reasons. I can't believe this rumor picked up so much steam. I mean there isn't enough to cover with all the injuries that we have to go out there and say that the anti-baseball-christ could join the Mets...gag.”

Why John could not have gone with something more rudimentary than “anti-baseball-christ” (I would have preferred something like, you know, “jerk,” or “Son of Satan”), we shall never know. Perhaps if he had taken the time to realize how many other ballplayers have juiced, labeling Bonds the “anti-baseball-christ” would make baseball the axis of Americas evil? Of course, for a team that has housed the likes of Paul Lo Duca and Guillermo Mota, such a hemorrhage of our values that would be.

But I digress; you know how I myself feel about Bonds. What I find interesting about the current Bonds debate is how much Young’s quote does not reflect the disparity between the mainstream media and the blogsphere on the subject. This type of gap has been clearly apparent over the past month, with Bonds still unsigned as of Sunday.

Anyone familiar with the rigors of sports writing (that is what this is called right?) will tell you that I do not have the column space (or the time for that matter) to consolidate all my thoughts on the stat vs. scouts dispute, which has plagued baseball since the publication of Moneyball almost five years ago. One would think that while the more statistically inclined people would magnify Bonds’s offensive contribution to some extent, the current Bonds issue is not about pitting the traditionalists against the stat gurus. In many cases, this may not appear to be valid, but, to cite one example, Mike Steffanos of Mikes Mets is certainly no fan of sabermetrics, yet he too would be willing to add Bonds were it not for the massive contract he will be seeking.

Still, however, it is the more progressive and statistically-familiar bloggers that tend to consider makeup issues ancillary to how players perform, particularly someone like Bonds, who despite creeping into his mid-40’s continue to tear through the National League year after year. But just why is the disparity between the two factions so large?

It is worth noting that if you read through most Bonds-related columns in newspapers today, you will notice a disturbing trend: almost all of them safely assume that Bonds is a needle-thumping headache, without taking into account just how many other ballplayers have probably juiced throughout their careers, something we all know they and the MLBPA were all-too-familiar with back in the 1990’s. As Ken Rosenthal of Fox Sports recently wrote:

“Bonds represents a cancer in the industry. He is not the only player alleged to have used performance-enhancing drugs during baseball's steroid epidemic. But he is not just another name in the Mitchell report, either.

The signing of Bonds would put the sport's problem with PEDs back in the headlines at a time when the fallout from the Mitchell report is fading, a time when Roger Clemens is more of a question for the government than a question for baseball.”

Now, you can read John Brattain’s column over at The Hardball Times for a more lengthy response, but it is safe to say that Rosenthal’s reasoning here (if there is any) is absurd and ignorant of reality. But why do so many sports columnists have this habit? The simple answer, from my own experience and what I have heard from a slew of people familiar with the industry, is that writing something as radical as defending Barry Bonds would not be in tune with the establishment.

What I mean by this is that newspapers and their Op-Ed and column pages, driven by syndication and profit factors, are precluded from publishing writers' work that reflect a more progressive stance. What is an acceptable debate to fans is not necessarily an acceptable debate for the establishment. The fact is, evident by the Tampa Bay Rays' eccentric General Manager Andrew Friedman’s virtual non-interest in Bonds when the club's 2008 playoff prospects would dovetail so well with his addition, Bonds is generally viewed as a selfish jerk inside of baseball, particularly to the mainstream media.

Unfortunately, this type of situation is widespread throughout baseball circles. A former intern that I spoke to at a well-known baseball magazine told me that he was reprimanded for spending office hours working on statistical research and those writers were often dissuaded from publishing work with an emphasis on statistics. Part of the reason is that so many publications, such as his, were dependent upon their ties to baseball and scouts, and were worried about offending those very people.

So just how does Bonds fit into the Mets plans for 2008? It is hard to say; my fantasy of packaging Ryan Church in a deal for Johan Santana in January were never realized, and even if both players could find themselves playing every day for the first two months while Moises Alou attempts to come back from his hernia injury, but Alou is likely to still play around 80 games and the Mets are committed to playing Church everyday after trading Lastings Milledge for him. But you can be sure of one thing; if a when someone does go against the establishment and acquire him, they will be pretty happy they did.

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