Lonely At The Top

At 11:52 p.m. EST, I watched Barry Bonds break Hank Aaron’s record. After his son congratulated him and his teammates walked (not ran) to home plate to greet him, Bonds tipped his hat to the hometown crowd, gave Willie Mays a hug, said a few words, shook a few hands, and then sat at the end of the dugout bench by himself. You couldn’t mistake the look of relief on his face that the pressure of the chase was finally over, but what was missing was the jubilance, the pure boyish delight in having accomplished the unthinkable. Instead, it was the face of a very jaded man who has stolen a piece of immortality.

I watched the events unfold with resignation, as I know fans who were still awake were doing and those who will learn about it in the morning will do. We knew it was coming. It was just a matter of time, just as it’s only matter of time before the digging and investigating come to a head. I want Bonds to get his comeuppance for tainting the game, but I’m almost afraid of the fallout that will accompany the home run king being dethroned by irrefutable evidence. The game has lost a little of its innocence through Bonds’ pursuit of the record, but how much will these revelations cost baseball? This boil will make the strike of 1994 look like a pimple, and we all know how long it took for that blemish to heal.

Instead of congratulating Bonds, I want to give my condolences to Mike Bacsik, Jr. of the Washington Nationals. It was tough luck to deliver the pitch Bonds launched into the stands for 756*, but we know it wasn’t for lack of fighting against the inevitable.

Mike, it must have been a lonely place on that mound with thousands of flash bulbs committing your moment of infamy to memory, but just remember that you’re not the one who will go down in baseball history for being infamous.