Laura Fulmer told me at church the other evening that she missed reading my columns. So she’s the one!
Anyway, I have had a few random things on my mind of late that I felt like sharing. Here’s one of them:
Did you see Barry Bonds hit home run number 756 last Tuesday night? I haven’t been actively keeping up with it, but when I laid down that night, ESPN was showing the progress of his second at-bat of the game against the Washington Nationals, so I flipped over to ESPN2 to watch.
During that time up, he hit a double to right-center. I went back to watching some other mindless drivel, the news I think, before going back to the game a little while later.
The game was now in the bottom of the fourth inning and Bonds was something like two hitters away when out three was recorded.
Sure enough, I fell asleep during the top of the fifth and missed it. As my stepson Sam likes to say, “Darnigle!”
Anyway, when I got up Wednesday morning, I saw online where he had hit the record breaker. I wore my Giants cap (purchased only because Megan played for the Giants in the coach-pitch league) to the radio station that morning. Guess it was my tacit recognition of the new record-holder.
Say what you will about the legitimacy of Bonds’ record, but if you are a baseball fan at all, you’ve gotta at least recognize the awesomeness (is that a word?) of anyone hitting that many home runs. This ain’t a Sunday walk in the park, folks. Whether or not you’ve had the help of ‘roids, it’s still mighty hard to hit a small, round ball that is being thrown at you at speeds around 90 miles an hour some 320-450 feet in the opposite direction. For Bonds to have done just that 757 times now (as of this writing) is pretty incredible.
I was seven years old when Henry Aaron broke Babe Ruth’s record of 714 home runs in April of 1974. Needless to say, we didn’t have all the cable, satellite and Internet options we have now, so I didn’t see that one live either. One of the few things I vividly remember about Aaron’s record-breaker was thinking how odd it was that those two guys ran out on the the field and was patting Aaron on the back as he rounded the bases. Nowadays, those two would probably be maced or shot or something before they could even get between the lines.
As I look back now, I’m ashamed of all the stuff Aaron had to go through from the ignorant bigots who called him names, made threats against him and his family and sent him hate mail for the sole reason that his skin color was different from theirs. That was the cloud that hung over the record when it was broken 33 years ago. How sad.
I’m still conflicted about how I feel now that Bonds statistically holds the home run record. Folks say that Bonds has cheated, although nothing has been proven as of yet. Also, baseball did not have a testing system in place when Bonds allegedly was using performance enhancers, so can you really say you cheated if what you did was not against the rules?
At the end of the day, I realize that who has the home run record and whether or not an asterisk is attached to it is so far down the list of things to be concerned about that it barely merits serious discussion.
I think I’ll leave it like this. Barry Bonds may have the record, but Hammerin’ Hank will always be the home run King to me.
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