Baseball Without Metaphor (Barry Bonds)

One night last fall Barry Bonds, the demon of America's pastime, caught a glimpse of his own redemption. The player who had been called a ''prima donna,'' a ''phony,'' ''overrated,'' ''a cancer'' and a ''spiritual drain on baseball'' was about to do what no one had ever done. He was having the greatest season in the history of the game, and now the 37-year-old San Francisco Giant was on the verge of breaking the single-season home-run record set by Mark McGwire only three years earlier -- and finally, as he had always vowed, ''melt'' his critics' pens.

For the moment, though, he tried to concentrate only on the pitcher, Chan Ho Park, a mercurial right-hander. Recently, almost no one had pitched to Bonds; as he neared the record, opposing teams increasingly walked him, prompting many to wonder if they were intentionally denying him a shot at history. His daughters had begun to hold signs that read: ''Please pitch to our daddy'' and ''Give our daddy a chance.''

Outside the stadium, people seemed even more determined to thwart him. A few weeks earlier, Dusty Baker, the Giants manager, knocked on Bonds's hotel room door with an F.B.I. agent at his side: Bonds had received a death threat. A man had called a Houston television station and vowed to shoot him before he could break the record. Bonds thought it was because of his race, that he was being threatened the way they had once threatened Hank Aaron, but the caller insisted it was something else: like so many fans, he just hated him.

But now as Bonds watched the pitcher go through his motion he didn't think about any of that. He waited until the pitch was almost past him, then uncoiled his bat, swinging so hard that he pulled the ball into the deepest part of the park. As it vanished over the wall, the crowd rose to its feet. Many in the press box, reporters and broadcasters who had often badmouthed Bonds publicly and privately, stopped typing and stood. His teammates -- who in April, when Bonds hit his 500th home run, left him standing alone at the plate -- descended upon him as he crossed home and picked up Nikolai, his 11-year-old son and the team's bat boy, and pointed to the sky. Two innings later, Bonds did it again.

Although the game didn't end until after midnight, a podium was set up near home plate and held a ceremony in Bonds's honor. Once, while watching a similar tribute to Cal Ripken after he broke the record for most consecutive games, Bonds confided to a reporter that he would be too scared to get so close to the fans -- If you could hear the things they say to me'' -- but now as the crowd beckoned him, Bonds appeared from the dugout, still in his uniform and cap. It was at this point, as he looked out at the thousands that had lingered into the early-morning hours just to see him, that he seemed to contemplate his redemption. ''We've come a long way,'' he said to the fans. ''We've had our ups and downs.'' And then, as his teammates stood behind him and the crowd chanted his name, Bonds lowered his head and began to cry.

Within days, though, the fans' appreciation had reverted to antipathy. On talk radio and in the sports pages around the country, he was being blamed for everything from overpriced athletes to players' surly attitudes. ''It is a shame that a jerk like Barry Bonds . . . now is the home-run record holder,'' read one letter from The Los Angeles Times. ''Hopefully, someone with style and integrity will knock him out of the top spot. I, for one, will never buy another ticket to a Major League game.'' When Bonds's contract expired at the end of his record-breaking season, not a single team reportedly expressed public interest in luring away the greatest player in the game.

Then this season, as Bonds approached 600 career home runs, a feat achieved only by Hank Aaron, Babe Ruth and Willie Mays, and as his batting average skyrocketed above .350, the rumors came on full force that Bonds was juiced on steroids. There was no evidence -- and Bonds vehemently denied it -- but as allegations engulfed the game people began to look at him differently, studying his muscle mass for the telltale signs of chemical enhancement.

By summer, as word of another possible strike spread, things had only gotten worse. After Bonds casually commented that baseball could survive its ninth work stoppage in the last 30 years (''It's entertainment,'' he told The Washington Post. ''It will come back. A lot of companies go on strike. . . . And people still ride the bus''), he was again roundly denounced as the embodiment of everything that was wrong with the sport. ''I yearn for the day that Bonds leaves Major League baseball,'' said Chet Coppock, a host on Sporting News Radio. ''He won't be missed for 10 seconds.''

Baseball, of course, has long been played under the burden of metaphor. Moreso than basketball or football, it is supposed to represent something larger than itself. As the former baseball commissioner A. Bartlett Giamatti once claimed, ''It is a dream of ourselves as better than we are.''

Although baseball actually began as a game played largely by urban toughs, its image was soon reconstructed to mirror the country's pastoral myth. And in the constant search for meaning in the flick of a glove or a routine hit, most of the game's greatest players, no matter how ordinary or reprehensible off the field, were also transformed into something more than they actually were. (There were exceptions, of course, like Ty Cobb, whose official biographer referred to as ''psychotic.'') In his recent book on Joe DiMaggio, Richard Ben Cramer described how the owners, along with a complicit media, created an unofficial ''hero machine'' that invented entire personalities around the best sluggers. Many of the writers, whose travel and food and lodging were paid for by the owners, turned Ruth's appetite for female fans into an appetite for hot dogs.

The country became so steeped in the metaphoric nature of the game that when the Supreme Court in 1972 upheld its antitrust exemption, it cited the words from a New York district judge and said that baseball is on a ''higher ground'' and that ''it behooves everyone to keep it there.''

Even after the writers were no longer plied with free travel and bottles of scotch, the machine remained sufficiently intact to reinvent recent sluggers, most notably McGwire, who despite a reputation for arrogance and rudeness became known as the antidote to Bonds. ''From his 20-inch biceps to his 500-foot blasts, everything about Mark McGwire is Bunyanesque -- including his heart,'' wrote Sports Illustrated in 1998.

But as the latest strike loomed, it it has become harder and harder to deny the true nature of baseball -- that it is, at its core, a business like any other, filled with labor disputes, petty disagreement, greed and drugs. Still, rather than view the threat of a strike as the ordinary jostling of competing self-interests, it has been spoken of as a moral catastrophe and a violation of some sacred trust. And alongside the old hero machine there has, over the last decade of strife, emerged a kind of antihero machine, in which the most ordinary weakness -- from conceit to carousing to even a divorce -- can be seized upon as proof of some larger rot.

Perhaps no one has been more ravaged by this new machine than Barry Bonds, the most dominant player of the modern era. At the very moment when Bonds is edging closer to the all-time home-run record, when in another age he would be lionized for his grace and strength, he has become a new kind of archetype -- ''The poster boy for the modern spoiled athlete'' and ''a symbol of baseball's creeping greed and selfishness, complete with diamond earring.''

When I arrived in San Francisco this July, Bonds was once again refusing to engage in the rituals required of a celebrity athlete. He wasn't giving press conferences or posing for pictures, and after another series of negative articles focusing on steroids and his disagreements with teammates, he had imposed a ''boycott'' on the local sports writers. He devised elaborate strategies to keep them at bay, using an army of sentries: his imposing personal trainer; the Giants' bevy of public relations officials; and his childhood friend, Steve Hoskins, who sometimes served as his informal ''publicist,'' a job that mostly meant refusing requests, including one from George Will, whom Hoskins said he had never heard of. Usually, though, Bonds simply greeted anyone who invaded his space with a cold stare.

One afternoon before a game against the World Series champion Arizona Diamondbacks, while the union was still contemplating a strike date, the press, increasingly desperate for even a routine quote, was deciding whether to dare invade his space. The more Bonds denied reporters access the more they seemed to despise him. As Bonds suddenly walked through the pack, his eyes smoldering at them, one of the writers said under his breath, ''There goes Mr. Personality.''

Later he appeared in the batter's box. Curt Schilling, the Diamondbacks' All-Star pitcher, came out and leaned against the cage. In 2000, Schilling had told reporters, ''Barry Bonds is a first-ballot Hall of Famer . . . but when he retires, he's still going to be the biggest ass who ever lived. Ask his teammates. Ask anyone on their team or in their clubhouse.'' Now, as Schilling and the press looked on, Bonds compressed his hands around the handle of the bat, rubbing the wood between his fingers. He smacked a line shot into deep left field. Then he smacked another, this one even farther, ricocheting off the wall. When Bonds finished his turn, he twirled his bat like a baton and walked off the field.

Despite his boycott of the local press, Bonds had agreed to talk with me, and as he approached the dugout, I tried to introduce myself. I extended my hand, but he kept walking, his eyes on a knot of reporters and cameramen moving toward him. He put his palm in front of one of the TV cameras, bumped my shoulder and vanished inside.

For days I tried unsuccessfully to approach him. Then one afternoon, Bonds suddenly sat down beside me in the dugout shortly before a day game in Los Angeles. Most of the players were still in the clubhouse or stretching on the field, and we had the area to ourselves.

Bonds had hurt his hamstring the night before, collapsing in mid-stride as he ran toward the wall, and now he had a bandage on his thigh. His head was shaved, setting off his handsome, if blunt, features. It was his eyes, though, that caught my attention. They can be frank and expressive one minute, then cold and impassive the next. At the moment, they seemed to be deciding between the two. ''Dude, I've seen you watching me,'' Bonds finally said.

As I began to pepper him with questions, he was polite but guarded. When I asked how he thought the fans and media perceived him, he insisted he didn't know. When I asked how all the public criticism had affected him after his monumental season, he said: ''I don't think about it. I don't read the paper that much. I read the business section.''

The dugout began filling with players. Someone brought out a bucket with sunflower seeds, and several players stuffed them in their pockets while others hastily rubbed pine tar on their bats. Bonds said he had been scratched from the lineup due to his injury and that he needed to see the trainer.

I assumed that was the end of the interview, but instead he led me down a long corridor that echoed with the clicking of his spikes. The locker room was empty, except for an elderly man folding towels. In a tiny back room scattered with weights and bandages, Bonds pulled up a chair and, leaning back against the wall, began to talk openly. ''People who say they're not afraid of anything are liars,'' he said. ''I'm afraid every time I go up there, not of being hit, but of failure.'' He said he tried to succeed by concentrating on only what he did on the field. But then he admitted, ''I know how I'm perceived. I know I'm supposed to be some kind of monster.''

Once on KBNR, a San Francisco sports radio station, after a fan denounced him and said he should be traded, the show's host took the next call. ''We have a call from a Barry in San Francisco. Barry, what would you like to talk about?''

''I hear this all the time,'' the caller said plaintively. ''He's arrogant, he's this. . . . ' I'm not arrogant. I'm good. There's a difference.''

The host seemed stunned when he realized it was Barry Bonds on the line. ''I'm sorry that I had to get on the phone like this,'' Bonds said.

When I asked him now about the incident, Bonds shrugged and said, ''My wife was listening to it.'' He seemed aware of almost every slight, even those that never appeared in print. He had spies up in the press booth, Bonds explained to me, that reported back to him the things reporters and broadcasters said to one another. ''They don't know I have ears up there, but I do. I know everything they say. Everything.'' He sounded more tired than angry, as if he had given up trying to change people's views. ''If you sit up in the booth and call me all these names, then why do you come down and look me in the face and say hi?''

His trainer peered in the room, but Bonds seemed to want to keep talking. ''They expect you to be who they want you to be, not who you are,'' he said. ''If they could only judge a player by their own eyes, if they could just watch me play, what I do on the field.''

In the background, we could hear the sound of the national anthem being sung and the players being introduced. Bonds leaned forward in his chair, preparing to go, then settled back for a moment. ''There are times I've thought about quitting,'' he said. ''A lot of times.''

Barry Bonds has a hero's pedigree. His father, Bobby, was an All-Star outfielder, his godfather is Willie Mays, his distant cousin is Reggie Jackson. ''The thing you need to understand,'' Bonds tells me, ''is that I was born into this game.''

After the San Francisco Giants called up his dad in 1968, Barry, then no more than 4 or 5 years old, hung out in the locker room eyeing the aging Mays. ''He was always watching me,'' Mays tells me, always trying ''to take my glove.'' Although Barry relished being in the clubhouse, he was aware even then of how he was being perceived. ''You don't know who your friends are at times,'' he says. ''You don't know if they want to be your friend because you're the son of Bobby Bonds.''

An instinctive player like his father, in high school Barry was already being called ''a superstar.'' He was so fast, his teammates say, that he would steal bases and never slide. Yet in his senior year in high school, in a kind of harbinger of his entire career, another player was named the M.V.P., even though Bonds put up the best numbers. ''That had to do with the fact that Barry was perceived even then to be cocky and arrogant,'' Dave Canziani, Bonds's high-school teammate, told me. ''He clearly deserved the award.''

His high-school coach has said, ''He wanted to be liked, tried so damn hard to have people like him . . . But then he'd say things he didn't mean, wild statements. Still, he'd be hurt. People don't realize he can be hurt, and is, fairly often.''

In 1985, the Pittsburgh Pirates drafted the 20-year-old outfielder in the first round. Lanky, with long, graceful strides and a lighting-quick, powerful swing, Bonds wore a thin mustache and, before long, his trademark diamond earring.

As he tore through the minors, his story -- from his birthright to his natural swing -- eventually became part of the baseball lore that burnished all of the game's greatest hitters. There was the tale, for instance, of how in 1986 Syd Thrift, the Pirates general manager, watched Bonds pull five balls over the fence in right field during batting practice. As Thrift often recalled, he told Bonds that was great, now how about a few over the left-field fence? Bonds hit the next few over the left-field fence and said, ''How's that?'' That night, the story goes, was the last game Barry Bonds played in the minor leagues.

But there was trouble with the myth of Barry Bonds from the start. First of all, to be Barry Bonds, the heir to baseball's mythic past, he needed to both be like his father but also surpass him, to achieve what Bobby hadn't been able to and become the ''next Willie Mays.'' ''I don't call them expectations,'' Bonds says today. ''I call them manipulations. You're a young kid and you have other people brainwashing you, making you believe that you're something you may not be able to be.''

Often when he was in the clubhouse reporters would stop at his locker and start asking him about his father, how he compared to him and to his godfather, Mays. They would frequently call him Bobby by mistake, and he would stop the interview and say: ''I'm Barry. Bobby's my father.''

It wasn't just that he was in his father's shadow. ''My father and I were never really close when I was growing up,'' he once told ESPN, ''because he was never around. I wanted my dad at my Little League games, because everybody else's parents were there. My parents weren't there, just my mom.'' Bobby has said that he often came to the games but stayed in the car, not wanting to make a scene. ''He said he was there,'' Barry said, ''But I never saw him.''

In Pittsburgh, when for the first time he seemed to collapse under the expectations, when the can't-miss prospect started missing all the time, getting only 17 hits in his first 100 at bats, he grew increasingly defiant. Some players grumbled that Bonds refused to heed any instructions and that he was more concerned with himself than with the team. To compound that image, Bonds rarely spoke. Even after knocking in 114 runs, stealing 52 bases, and crushing 33 home runs in 1990, he would often refuse to give interviews or mingle with fans, telling writers and autograph-seekers to stay out of his face.

And when he did talk, he never sounded like a conventional superstar. Rather than speak of the game in mystical terms he referred to it openly as a business. As he still says today: ''I was asked when baseball was a game to you? The last game I played in college. Ever since then it's been a business. This is a business. We provide for our families. There are people we have to deal with that manipulate and con and try, you know, to cheat. It's not a game anymore.''

Whereas other players let their agents negotiate behind the scenes while they smiled at the cameras, Bonds came right out and said he should be paid millions by the Pirates or be traded. ''The Pirates can't keep crying broke,'' he said of the owners. ''You can't own half of Pittsburgh and say you're on welfare.''

Then came the day at spring training in 1991, when Bonds says one of his coaches accused him of sulking over his salary. Bonds started shouting at him while the TV and print guys zoomed in on the fray. Jim Leyland, the Pirates head coach, tried to intercede, and now they were going at it too, the manager and the star. ''I've been kissing your butt for three years,'' Leyland yelled. ''If guys don't want to be here, aren't happy with the money they're making, don't take it out on everybody else.''

After that -- and an ugly divorce played out in the tabloids -- it didn't seem to matter what Bonds did on the field. It didn't matter that Leyland pleaded with the fans to let up on the booing (''That is getting old. It's gone too far.'') or that Bobby Bonds begged reporters, ''Give my boy a chance.'' It didn't matter that Bonds won three M.V.P.'s in four years or that he would become the first player ever to hit 400 home runs and steal 400 bases or that he was majestic in left field, climbing the wall and catching the ball in the web of his mitt, winning eight Gold Gloves. It didn't matter that, unlike many players, Bonds never actually held out for more money or that, as his former teammate Bobby Bonilla put it to me, ''Once he knows you, he'll give you the shirt off his back.''

He was now Barry Bonds, ''the Pirates' M.D.P. -- Most Despised Player,'' as the Pittsburgh media began to call him; and by 1993, after the Giants acquired him and made him the highest-paid player in baseball, he was now the spoiled face of America's pastime.

One July afternoon, Bonds was sitting by himself at his locker. The area is only a few square feet, but slightly grander in scale than those around it. Rather than one or two wood-panel cubbies, he has three in a row. There is also, instead of the typical metal folding chair, a large leather recliner, which is repeatedly cost $3,000.

Although Bonds paid for the chair himself, and it is designed to help his ailing back (''They pay me millions of dollars to play baseball,'' Bonds says. ''What would they say if I hurt my back and couldn't play?''); and though one of the lockers is for his son, the bat boy, the entire area -- the ''kingdom,'' as it's sometimes called -- has been a constant fixture in the countless Bonds takedowns written in recent years. ''In the San Francisco Giants' clubhouse,'' Rick Reilly wrote in Sports Illustrated last year, ''everybody knows the score: 24-1. There are 24 teammates, and there's Barry Bonds.''

the romantic notion of the clubhouse as a traveling fraternity of working-class heroes -- the boys of summer -- is perhaps the most potent in all of baseball. But while the notion is still propagated, the reality is less and less like that, if it ever was. Most clubhouses have become rather businesslike affairs, where the players cautiously refrain from saying anything candid to the press trolling the clubhouse, instead offering the same platitudes about wanting to win and personal numbers not mattering, as if they were revealing a profound baseball truth.

In recent years, few players have been held up as representatives of the old ideal more than Jeff Kent, the Giants' slender, tightly coiled second-baseman, who in 2000 Kent beat out Bonds for the M.V.P. and is said to despise Bonds more than anyone in baseball. ''They've hated each other since the day Kent came to town in 1997,'' Ray Ratto of The San Francisco Chronicle observed. ''They hate each other today, and . . . the one who lives longer will attend the other's funeral, just to make sure he's dead.''

Last year, while Bonds was on the verge of breaking the home-run record, he told Rick Reilly of Sports Illustrated: ''I was raised to be a team guy, and I am, but Barry's Barry. It took me two years to learn to live with it, but I learned.'' Although Kent was publicly taking a teammate to task during a pennant race, which isn't quite the act of a ''team guy,'' there was little criticism of this in the sports media.

One day when I was in the locker room, not long after Kent and Bonds came to blows in the dugout in which Bonds appeared to put his forearm in Kent's throat, Kent, about to take off his towel, asked a pack of reporters if there were any ''queers'' or ''women'' among them -- a remark that, especially in San Francisco, would have created a certain stir. Although he was surrounded by at least a dozen reporters who half have seized upon any number of Bonds' remarks, none, as far I know, reported this. ''Is there a double standard because Kent talks to us?'' one sports radio announcer told me. ''Definitely.''

In contrast to Kent, there were unofficial rules, I was told by reporters, to get to Bonds. Don't talk to him when he is getting dressed. Don't talk to him just before or after batting practice. Don't talk to him when he is sitting in his chair. Don't talk to him when he is talking to the trainer or to his son.

One day I decided to break the rules. I approached Bonds as he was reclining in the chair next to his conditioning coach. His shirt was off, and I could see the muscles along his stomach. Circling one of his giant biceps was a chain-link tattoo. He normally fell silent when a reporter intruded, but now he became vocal, nodding and complaining about all his vacation houses, how he has so many he doesn't know what to do, how he has a place in the mountains and a place in the Caribbean, how he has his own private ski slope and how in addition to keeping up his properties he also has to support everyone in his family.

For several minutes I stood there, listening. At one point, without a hint of remorse or self-consciousness, he said in a loud voice: ''My grandmother wants me to get her some wheelchair that drives like a car. Why do I need to get her some wheelchair when she's gonna die anyway?''

The next morning, when I warily approached him again, Bonds looked at me for a long time. Then he began to smile and said: ''Dude, I was just dawging you yesterday. I was just testing you, man. I wanted to see if you'd write that stuff in the paper.'' My first thought, beyond realizing that Bonds mistakenly thought I was a reporter for a daily newspaper, was that he had suspected that he'd been too loud and too obnoxious, and now he was manipulating me. But as I considered this, Bonds went on to describe what appeared to be an elaborate and mysterious defense mechanism. The theory, as far as I could tell, was that it was always better to strike first, to manipulate his own image, even if that meant creating a caricature of himself, than to be misunderstood and misrepresented by somebody else. ''No writer can ever know me,'' he said, as if to finally explain.

When I asked him why he had devised such an elaborate ruse, especially since it only made him look worse, he seemed surprised. ''When you come to the ballpark,'' he said, ''you're walking into a place that is all deception and lies.''

"The truth is,'' Bobby Bonds tells me one day, ''whatever you put down, whatever you say, that's what the world is going to believe about Barry. Not his friends, not me, not his family -- we know who Barry is -- but the world. You can make my son into a hero or you can make him into the devil.''

Barry Bonds was still young when his father's fall began. Although Bobby still continued to put up good numbers year after year, he never lived up to expectations. ''Anything I did that wasn't what Willie Mays did meant I never lived up to my potential,'' Bobby once said. Yet there were whispers that Bobby's failure was not just the result of the pressure of having to play in the shadow of Mays. In 1974 and 1975, when Bobby was playing for the Giants and the Yankees, stories began to appear in the papers with headlines like: ''Bonds Charged With Drunk Driving'' and ''Bonds Confronts Rumors About Drugs, Drinking''

Of course, Bobby Bonds wasn't the first player ever to get torn up in the press. But in the past most of the beat writers went out of their way to protect players off the field foibles. If a player was so drunk that during the national anthem he was puking in the showers, Cramer noted in his biography, the writers simply banged out a line about his ''stomach flu.''

But by the 1970's, when Mays was getting ready to retire and Bobby Bonds was embarking on his own career, the old codes were being broken. Part of it was due to the growth of televised games, which made it harder for reporters simply to cover what happened on the field. But part of it too was a revolution in the business of baseball. In 1972, the players, whose average salary was only $34,000, went on strike for the first time. Delaying the opening of the season by 13 days, the strike eventually paved the way for free agency, which liberated the players but created a system in which the best players increasingly moved from team to team, shattering a sense of loyalty with the fans. After Bobby Bonds and several other popular Yankees left in 1975, an article appeared in The New York Times under the headline: ''A 5-Year-Old Boy Loses His Heroes'' It asked: ''Do you tell this boy that baseball is not really just a game? . . . Is it correct to say that Bobby Bonds, whom he idolized, did not have fun playing here in New York, that he will be playing in some backyard in California next year? Can this youngster, precocious though he is, comprehend the complex web of the baseball superstructure? . . . Will he love baseball as his dad did, or will he be turned off?''

Bobby Bonds, as much as any player of the time, came to be seen as a part of ''the complex web of the baseball superstructure,'' offering his electric but erratic talents to the highest bidder. After he was traded seven times in seven years, the rumors about his personal problems only increased. ''What I was doing,'' he said, ''was probably no different than Mickey Mantle or a bunch of 'em,'' Bobby once said of his drinking. Finally, in 1981, one year after another strike-shortened season, he unceremoniously packed up his locker and left the sport.

Perhaps no one was more affected by the constant trades and gossip than his eldest son. ''Bobby went through a lot,'' Dusty Baker once said, ''and Barry has shared a lot of his dad's pain.''

Barry himself has stated, ''They never gave him the respect he deserves. Why should I believe things will be any different for me?''

According to Barry, one day, after Bobby had left the game and stopped drinking, he pulled his son aside. ''He told me to play the game for as long as I could because it all goes so fast,'' Barry said. ''And he told me to keep my mouth shut. I guess that second one got by me.''

"You can watch,'' Bonds said, as he walked into World Gym at 8 a.m. ''You're not here to ask questions. I don't want it to be like the F.B.I.'' Whereas his father was once rumored to have fallen short of his potential because of drugs, his son was now rumored to have exceeded his because of drugs.

He wore black sweat pants and black gloves. Laying down on one of the benches, he began to press several dumbbells while his strength coach, Greg Anderson, stood above him. ''I hate doing this,'' Bonds said, as he got up and looked in the mirror. ''In three years this is all coming off. My wife likes me this big, but I can't stand it.''

When Bonds first entered the National League in 1986 he had a sprinter's build. But after a few years, he became one of the first of the new generation of players who lifted weights, gradually transforming himself from a 185-pound leadoff hitter into a 230-pound slugger. ''I think Barry saw all this potential that my dad had, and it was just wasted,'' Barry's brother, Bobby Jr., told ESPN.

Bonds often gets up at 5 in the morning and runs sprints, even after night games. He lifts every day, isolating one segment of his body -- his shoulders or calves or abdomen. ''I had the lowest body fat of anyone on the team in spring training,'' Bonds said, suddenly talking with me after his initial refusal.

To stay in such condition he eats six specially prepared meals a day, consisting of fish, chicken, turkey, vegetables or, on rare instances, beef; each meal has 350 to 450 calories. ''Every month we take his blood and test his mineral levels to make sure they're in line so that if he's 10 milligrams off in zinc or 6 off in magnesium or 5 milligrams off in copper, that's what we replace,'' Anderson explained. ''That's how he stays in such good condition.''

Last year, as Bonds approached the record, he seemed in awe of his own power. During a humid series against the Atlanta Braves, with his uniform soaked through with sweat and his body crouched over the plate, he hit three home runs in a single game. When asked about his sudden surge, Bonds, who had never treated hitting as a rarefied science, told reporters: ''Call God. Ask him. It's like, wow. I can't understand it, either. I try to figure it out, and I can't figure it out. So I stopped trying.''

But this year, after two former All-Stars admitted that they had used illegal steroids during their careers, many began to openly question whether Bonds's production was fueled by steroids. ''The running bet in the office is that Barry's head has grown,'' which is a sign of steroids, a local reporter told me one day in the press box.

As fans began to yell ''Barry's on 'roids'' whenever he came up to bat, Bonds vehemently denied using them. At a game at Yankee Stadium, he seemed irate that the rumors were still circulating. ''I'm tired of it,'' he said. ''One minute I do this, and I'm good. The next minute I'm accused of other stuff. That's how you make a living,'' he said to the reporters gathered around him. ''The more blood you can drain, the more successful you can be.''

Now, as he sat up on the bench dropping two weights on the ground, Bonds said, ''It affects you when this stuff comes into your home. When my son comes up to me and says kids at school are asking him if his father is on drugs, that's when it bothers me.''

He paused, picking up another weight and studying it for a minute. ''My cap has been 71/2 forever,'' he said when I asked him about the speculation over whether his head has grown. He said he took the protein supplement creatine, which is legal and sold over the counter, but nothing more. ''I don't need to take anything illegal. Why do I need to cheat? I'm already good.''

He did several reps, sweat starting to soak through his shirt. ''No one wants to believe that someone is just good,'' he said. ''They always want to find something. There has to be some reason. They have to believe there's a catch to why he's different from anyone else. They have to think you're cheating.'' He continued, ''The problem with me is that they don't have anything on me. You really think about my career, honestly think about my career, what do they really got on me? Nothing. I don't do drugs. I don't go with prostitutes. I got divorced. That's it. Nothing.''

After an hour of working out he went into the lobby, where Anderson ordered him one of his meals, scrambled egg whites and turkey sausage. He seemed like a different person here than the one in the clubhouse, almost unguarded. Every few minutes someone came by to hug or chat with him and he smiled and laughed, tilting his head back and embracing him or her in his giant arms.

''You got to try one of these, man,'' he said to me, holding out a piece of sausage on the end of his fork. ''You're gonna pass out. You've never had anything like that in your life. And they have this barbecue chicken. . . . ''

I started to ask him a question, but before I could finish he asked it himself: ''Why do I change at the ballpark? There's nothing truthful at the ballpark. Except the game.'' He picked up the paper, where there was a story on the potential strike. A poll said that more fans blamed the rich players than the rich owners for the endless disputes over salary caps. He studied the article for a long time then put down the paper: ''They say: 'You should just be happy. You're making a whole lot of money.' Baby, I earned this money. I don't give a damn. You can say whatever you want. I earned this money. I worked for this money. I didn't work to be called names all day.''

Oddly, by being one of the few players who spoke candidly about the business of baseball, he was often shunned by the business world itself. Although he has dominated his sport for several years (''Total Baseball,'' the bible of statistics, concluded that he was the best player in the National League in 1990, 91, 92, 93, 95, 96, 98, 2000 and 2001) -- he has never received the kind of corporate endorsements that other sports stars have. ''They don't like me,'' he once acknowledged.

After he broke the home-run record, Bonds cut commercials for Charles Schwab and KFC, including one in which he appeared with Hank Aaron. But he said of all the commercials and banquets and engagements off the field: ''This isn't me. The game is my stage. That's where I'm happiest.''

''I'm a ballplayer,'' Bonds told me of his negative image. ''I'm not a P.R. man. I'm a ballplayer. You know how many words I got to say out on the baseball field? 'I got it!''' At one point, when I asked him if he ever wanted to be revered like his godfather, he thought about it for a long time. ''I want to be a ballplayer,'' he said. ''A damn good one.'' Then he stood up to go. ''I got to take my kids to school,'' he said.

It was Willie Mays. His voice was hard to hear over the phone, almost a whisper. He is 71, and when he shows up at Pacific Bell Park -- where there is a statue and a plaza named after him -- to watch his godson, fans, many of them too young to have seen him play, still surround him.

At first when I asked him about Barry he seemed hesitant to talk. ''This isn't my thing,'' Mays told me, and the more we spoke, the more striking it was how much he sounded like his godson. When I asked him why Barry was criticized so vehemently, he paused for a while, as if searching for the precise reason. ''Whatever you ask him,'' he finally said, ''he'll tell you the truth.''

Mays said he still offered his Bonds advice when he was struggling at the plate, but lately he had nothing to offer: ''He hasn't been in a rut.''

Indeed, Barry Bonds is fast approaching the heights of his godfather, the only player of his generation to ever do so. Already the only player ever to hit 400 home runs and steal 400 bases, as of late August, Bonds was only 11 bases short of creating a new club: 500/500. It is not inconceivable that he will end his career with more runs batted in than any other player, passing Hank Aaron's 2,297. And while his fielding and lifetime batting average may never reach Mays's, he is likely in the next few seasons, barring injury, to surpass Mays in total home runs (660) and is potentially within reach of Hank Aaron's all-time record of 755. ''He has often said to me, 'Willie, I don't want to pass you,' and I always say, 'Wait a minute,''' Mays recently said. ''I tell him: 'Home runs are there to be hit. If you pass me, pass Ruth, pass Hank, then just go ahead and do it. You can't lay back and not pass who you want. This is just baseball.'''

On a recent summer night, shortly before the players union set the strike date, Bonds, only 2 home runs shy of becoming the fourth player in history ever to hit 600, broke his boycott of the local media and held a press conference. He sat at the dais in his uniform, facing the three dozen or so reporters and cameramen who had filled the tiny room in the bowels of the stadium. There were no questions about steroids or the strike. For the moment, with the season in jeopardy and the opportunities for greatness running out, the reporters appeared happy just to be talking with Bonds again, and Bonds seemed happy to be talking to them without having to defend himself. ''I don't understand how I got here yet,'' Bonds said in a soft-spoken voice. ''I just got done doing one thing that was shocking, and now there's a another chapter, another shock.''

After a few minutes he walked into the clubhouse and sat in his corner by himself, getting ready for the game against the Chicago Cubs. Normally, his son got dressed beside him, then went milling around the clubhouse the way Barry once had. He was already known in Little League as a rising superstar, the son of Barry Bonds. ''At least one of us,'' Barry often jokes, ''has won a championship.'' When the press circles around his father he often looks at them with the same wary, blank eyes. Once when a crush appeared around his dad he seemed almost scared. ''I'm out of here,'' he said, pushing his way out.

''He's not gonna be the next Barry Bonds,'' Bonds told me. ''He's gonna be his own man.''

But now, to my surprise, instead of his son, who was on vacation, his father suddenly appeared at Barry's side. Bobby had recently undergone surgery to remove a tumor and still looked frail. He wore blue jeans and a black T-shirt. ''We had a little talk,'' Bobby told me after he left the clubhouse. ''I was getting his mind to where it's supposed to be. Making sure that he stays relaxed and realizes how much fun this is. Don't take it out of context of what it really is.''

Upstairs, we sat with Barry's mother and second wife and one of his daughters. It was a cool night, and every seat was filled. Out in San Francisco Bay, out past right field where Barry often hit his longest balls, boats gathered hoping to fish out of the water his 599th and, ultimately, the one that counted -- 600th home run. When Bonds first stepped into the batter's box with two men on, the stadium lit up with flash bulbs. The Cubs had a rookie left-hander on the mound, and no one knew if he'd pitch to him. After two balls, the crowd started to boo; but then, with one strike, the lefty came right at him, and Bonds lined a shot into right center. The crowd rose in expectation, but it skidded into the alley. Only a double. ''He's more relaxed than I've ever seen him,'' Bobby said.

As we waited for another turn, Bobby shook his head. ''You know what's a shame?'' he said. ''A lot of people will have missed all that he's done -- missed the entire parade.'' He looked around at the people gathered into the stadium. ''Sometimes in this park he can hit a home run and everyone will cheer and think he's the greatest in the world, but they will still dislike him when the day's over with.'' He shook his head, his voice trailing off. Barry's wife, a pretty, slender woman, handed him a plate with hot dogs and started to clap as Bonds came up again. Before he stepped into the batter's box he waved to his family. ''Look for him to do something,'' Bobby said.

Once again, the rookie came right at him. ''Here it comes,'' said Bobby. This time, on a one-two pitch, Bonds uncorked his bat, crushing the ball into the farthest reaches of the park, more than 420 feet away. Bonds dropped his bat and watched. The crowd roared as the scoreboard flashed his latest total: 599. ''Do I know my son?'' Bobby said, standing up, trying to peer over the tops of hundreds of heads as his son crossed home plate. No one in the stadium sat down, and after a minute Barry came out of the dugout and tipped his hat.

As he stood there, smiling as the crowd chanted his name, I thought for the first time I could see him for what he really is, the true face of baseball -- a game that at its best and stripped of the dead weight of metaphor, satisfies everyone's self-interest: the fans, the owners and Bonds himself, who gets to play the game he loves and is better at, arguably, than anyone who has ever played.

After a few minutes he ducked into the dugout, then took the field, resting his hands on both knees. He would still have three more at-bats to try for his 600th. But for the moment, as the crowd settled back into its seats, there were no heroes or demons. Just baseball. Isn't that enough?

I wonder how many of us, if badgered for comment pre- and post- game by local radio, local TV and local newspapers, not to mention the national outlets, would come off as jerks.

Ask me nine times a day how I tie my shoes, or why I can't hit Pitcher A, I'm likely to say something snide eventually...

Well, regarding the first comment: It would probably depend entirely on the game situation and whether there were any preconceptions on the part of a writer or, perhaps, the player. Regarding the second comment, it kind of ties to the first and my answer to it: Speaking as a writer myself (I was a newsie for a long time, small dailies and small daily radio news, and if there is a chance yet for me to revive my career, well, I want to be what I should have been in the first place - a baseball writer), well, I'm not quite the type to ask a fellow how he ties his shoes, unless he happened to sport a very distinctive looking knot that I might admire or at least find theoretically impossible. But as for asking why a certain player has a certain string of ill performance against a certain pitcher, the way you do it is not to ask him as though you're trying to expose a fatal flaw. I'd probably ask along the line of, "Well, from the look of it, it seems you've studied this pitcher, watched his repertoire, its movement, his delivery changes with it when you face him, and for all that you still don't do as well with him as you do with some of the others on his level. Could something still be missing in there that perhaps you haven't found yet?" Something like that. It is hardly illegitimate to question a player as to why a particular pitcher gives him the fits, or to question a pitcher as to why a certain hitter is his master, but if you do it as though you think it means said player or said pitcher just isn't there no matter his rep, what a surprise that he gets ornery with you.

Consider: Sandy Koufax, who was almost never rude with the press even after a bad game, would still give the better of his time to those who questioned him in serious terms of baseball rather than just trying to find a more gaping chink in his armour. Though I wasn't aware of it until well after he retired, there was a hitter whom he couldn't stop with an arrest warrant, and apparently he did speak a few times during his career about it. His one-time catcher Jeff Torborg remembered: We tried everything. Fast balls, curve balls, changeups. Nothing worked. Bob Uecker owned Sandy Koufax. (Uecker, believe it or not, hit .400 lifetime against Koufax. Go figure.) Koufax if anything is far more reticient in his retirement than he was as a player - a beautiful profile of him in Sports Illustrated three years ago (I had it, I lost it - dang it!) mulcted from people who got to know him wherever he lived over the years (Koufax was something of a nomad for awhile) that Koufax simply prefers to be regarded as no one out of the ordinary when he's not directly involved in something baseball and doesn't like a fuss made over him, the kind of guy who likes to pop into a luncheonette for a bite and have people just say hello and chat with him as another guy in the neighbourhood. When he is involved with something baseball, he will talk, though reluctantly, not from rudeness but because from his earliest Dodger seasons he was painfully shy and not exactly a jockocrat. (The legendary columnist Jim Murray wrote a charming column, during Koufax's breakout season in 1961, in which he noted Koufax's abiding passion at the time, aside from his portable stereo on which he would listen to Mendelssohn as well as Frank Sinatra, was...sweaters, often showing up on the road at various men's stores before opening time so he could have first picks of anything new that happened in.)

Believe it or not, there was a time when the notorious Dave Kingman was accommodating with the writers (I believe his serious media trouble began after he was dealt away from the Mets the first time), and he was particularly futile against Andy Messersmith. Well, a writer caught Kingman the right way and got a jewel from the tall slugger which actually turned up in Edwin Newman's charming book on language, Strictly Speaking: "I have had terrible success against that man."

Dick Young, the legendary baseball writer of the New York Daily News, in the years before he became a curmudgeonly near-stooge of ownership, would go into the clubhouses and tell players point blank, "I wrote what I wrote because I believe it. You got complaints, let me hear 'em. Nothing wrong with that. You want better stories? Win some games and play them right." And except for one or two hard nuts, Young pretty much had his way with the Brooklyn Dodgers (his beat until the Dodgers left for Los Angeles), at least until Roger Kahn of the Herald Tribune, a slightly more cerebral sort than the blunt Young, happened along for three seasons. Kahn in his way sent the same message, and between Young and Kahn they probably got the best stories of any of the beat writers about the Boys of Summer.

I will say that, in the just-concluded "labour dispute" (it was really a management dispute, but why should anyone let the truth get in the way of a comfy prejudice), there were a few too many hysteriamongers in the media who took it as their mission to inflame rather than inform or illuminate and, in my opinion, having listened and read them closely enough (and many, from Frank Deford to Thomas Boswell, are men whom you'd have thought would know better), malinformed fans who were uninformed enough and whipped them up into a froth beyond reasonable doubt, especially knowing that both the owners and the Players Association worked under virtual gag orders from The Commish (which should explain some of the non-revelatory rhetoric that came forth in the weeks before the deal was done), when they could have, instead, taken the time and turned down their burners enough to give fans at least a rudimentary picture of the thing as it was, as opposed to how prejudice had it, and then leave it up to the fans to choose whether or not they cared to remain as many enough held them to be, ignorant or uncaring. In an era where a baseball commissioner's basic idea of promoting and selling his sport has generally been comparable to trying to sell a skunk as a room freshener, the sportswriters and talk-show commentators indulged themselves in hysteria whipping and disinformation that would have been considered deplorable had it come from the political media.

"the sportswriters and talk-show commentators indulged themselves in hysteria whipping and disinformation that would have been considered deplorable had it come from the political media."

You noticed it, too. I write commentary, as well. All along, I've been utterly confident there would be no strike.

For the first time in the history of the negotiations, the owners were not trying to a.) break the union or b.) impose a salary cap. Nor did either side appear to want a strike, as the owners so clearly did in 1994.

There were no new concepts involved. The only issues to be negotiated were a mutual determination of the amounts and technical processes (e.g., draft) of pre-existing elements -- how to divvy up the pie, not how to make the pie.

What's more, both sides had seen Hiroshima in 1994. Neither wanted to visit Nagasaki.

In other words, this was a boilerplate labor-management negotiation process. Meaning it would get done. And that it wouldn't get done until the eleventh hour, after both sides had squeezed the other's turnip one last time.

And so it was.

Nonetheless, many in the media seemed to be pushing for a strike this time around -- simply to serve their own agendas and prejudices.

I have become every bit as disappointed with the general level of sports journalism as I am with what passes for political reporting and analysis.

Perhaps I'll re-read a Roger Angell book this weekend...

There were a pack of so-called hardliners among the owners who probably did have in mind breaking the Players Association and imposing salary caps of a sort. They also had about as much credibility as a mongoose promising not to molest a cobra on the first date. (Consider: One of them is the man who was the primary villain of the 1994 strike - Jerry Reinsdorf, Chicago White Sox owner. He pushed for that strike and got it and, as Whitey Herzog no less put it, "he put the game on a respirator." All the while screaming about financial responsibility and putting those damn players in their place once and for all. And what did he do when it was all over at last, after he'd destroyed a hell of a season and the World Series? He shoved Albert Belle into the vault and told him he wasn't letting him out until he'd helped himself to $11 million a year for five years, three million higher than the top annual player salary in the game at the time. Financial responsibility ended when the need to get baseball's biggest black sheep away from the division rival Cleveland Indians, and never mind that Belle had the kind of PR that was liable to blow up in Reinsdorf's face or that he was liable to help give back as many runs in the field as he could put on the board with his bat. But Jerry Reinsdorf blew what little credibility he had with the Belle signing, well enough before Tom Hicks - another of the hardliners - thought he could rant his head off about fiscal discipline with nobody remembering that he, who needed pitching above anything else, spent the equivalent of a solid pitching staff, developed, traded, and signed alike, to get that five-plus team ERA down with...a shortstop.)

But the real banana peel in the new deal, which I noticed only a few discussing today, is this: There is no requirement now, just as there was none in the existing revenue sharing agreement, that those owners who qualify for either revenue shares or the so-called "luxury tax" (it is nothing more than a behaviour modification tax of a sort which virtually punishes those owners who operate reasonably and invest intelligently in their teams by forcing them to hand over money to those owners who cannot and do not operate reasonably or invest intelligently in their teams) spend the monies from those shares or tax payments on baseball-specific matters only. (Too much wiggle room, in other words, for the Carl Polhads, David Glasses, Bud Seligs, John Moores, and Jerry Reinsdorfs of the major leagues.) And I suspect the players know its well enough, which is why, for the concessions they did make this go-round the players actually have an upper hand even if they don't yet see it in that way. And if that welfare-queen contingent among the owners continues behaving to form with the new revenue shares and luxury tax dollars, all but pocketing the monies and then crying poverty in the same breath, I suspect the next CBA negotiations are going to be a little more arduous and a lot more painful, on the "fool us once, shame on you; fool us twice, shame on us" principle.

Any Roger Angell volume will instruct and delight. So will Thomas Boswell's, particularly The Heart of the Order and How Life Imitates the World Series. I would also recommend Dave Kindred's new collection, Glove Stories; Red Smith On Baseball; Allen Barra's Clearing the Bases: The Greatest Baseball Debates of the Last Century; Jim Brosnan's happily-republished The Long Season; George Will's Bunts; Bill Veeck and Ed Linn's indispensable Veeck - As In Wreck; and, Ed Linn's excellent biography of Ted Williams, Hitter: The Life and Turmoils of Ted Williams. Among others...

If you eliminate their defencive performances from the equation, you have an impossible time deciding whether Mays or Aaron was the better player. But when you factor the defencive performances, it then and only then becomes no contest and, advantage: Mays. It doesn't denigrate Henry Aaron to say that Willie Mays and Mickey Mantle could beat you in just a few more ways than Henry Aaron could.

I'm a huge Bob Gibson fan, don't mistake me. He had The Right Stuff and he used it, too. But Marichal was actually better by more than a shaved whisker. Consider: Their careers all but overlapped, they had the same peak seasons (1961-71), and they were both no-nonsense (well, between the two Marichal was no questions asked the more entertaining pitcher to watch) men who knew what they were doing on the mound and took no guff or prisoners when they did it. You couldn't ask for two more unquestionable Hall of Famers this side of Sandy Koufax. Now, to the proverbial nitty gritty:

Those eleven peak seasons show Marichal a) with a better winning percentage in nine of them; b) with a lower earned run average in seven of them; c) with more complete games in seven of them; and, d) won more games and had a lower ERA in seven of them. Marichal also had six 20-win seasons to Gibson's five, and here again it's Marichal by a large enough margin. Gibson in his 20-win seasons never won more than 22; Marichal in his 20-win seasons won 25 or more three times (25 twice and 26 once). In Marichal's six 20-win seasons he lost in double digits twice; in Gibson's five 20-win seasons he lost in single digits twice.

And in those peak seasons in which the Cy Young Award was given to only one pitcher across the board (1961-66), had there been no Koufax Marichal would most assuredly have won the Cy in the years Koufax did win that across-the-board Cy. Gibson would not. Marichal, in fact, might also have won the Cy Young Award in 1968 if a) Gibson hadn't picked that year to rack up the lowest single-season ERA in baseball history, and b) enough of those voting for the award didn't still have their heads up their arses about The Incident. (Translation: Marichal had no excuse to belt Roseboro with the bat, but Roseboro, God rest his soul, may have instigated it by throwing a return ball to Sandy Koufax that nearly took Marichal's head off - Roseboro was steamed that Koufax had only brushed Willie Mays back once and Marichal back once, after Marichal had brushed back Maury Wills and Ron Fairly and was still pitching the Dodgers in tight in that August 1965 game - and then charging toward the angry pitcher with full catching gear still on and his mask practically cocked in his hand as if for a weapon.) And Gibson's ERA that season alone has the effect of skewing how he and Marichal align career to career as run preventors: as it is, the two are awfully close in their differences between their career ERAs and their league's (Gibson is ahead of Marichal by a measly .16)

Gibson's value gets a shot of rocket fuel because of the image he left behind with his World Series work. Nothing wrong with that, necessarily - great pitchers do turn it up in the Series, and it goes without saying that, even more important, they turn it up in the heat of a pennant race. (That's the primary reason why a debate exists as to whether or not Don Drysdale is a legitimate Hall of Famer - since his record is just too exact to a ton of pitchers who are not and should not be Hall of Famers, you go to whether he pitched like a Hall of Famer in pennant races and the answer, sadly enough, is an emphatic "no.") But it's not exactly Marichal's fault that he got into only one World Series to Gibson's three (and he wasn't having one of his better years, anyway, aside from which the Giants, perversely enough, used him in only one game...he pitched four innings, gave up two hits, two walks, struck out four and gave up no runs). Marichal, who actually pitched his best ball when the games mattered the most, would probably have acquitted himself very well in the World Series, if his four innings' work in the 1962 Series are any indicator. As it was, in 1962 Marichal was on the very threshold of greatness; he began his striking absolute-peak run in 1963.

In the other seasons, the Giants weren't quite as good a team as the Dodgers and Cardinals of the mid-1960s (which ought to alarm people who think a pack of future Hall of Famers guarantees success - think about it: the Giants of 1962-67 had five future Hall of Famers on the roster and couldn't close the deal, even in some of the most memorably tight pennant races of the decade). It wasn't Marichal's fault by any means - he was in fact the best heat-of-the-race pitcher in the National League in those years who wasn't named Koufax.

So who was the better winner? Well, Gibson retired with a .591 winning percentage. That is a no-questions-asked Hall of Fame winning percentage, by any man's definition, and if you pick off Gibson by strictly his peak seasons, his percentage in those seasons is well over .600. Marichal? The Dominican Dandy retired with a .631 winning percentage overall and had a better winning percentage in his absolute peak seasons while pitching for teams that were very good teams but were not as good as Gibson's teams. I think the weight of the evidence says Juan Marichal was the better pitcher, but it doesn't mean you won't be putting Gibson just beneath Marichal on any reasonable list of the fifteen best pitchers ever.

I'll never buy into the myth that Mays was a better fielder than Aaron.

If you did, you would be wasting your money. Henry Aaron's lifetime range factor was only 0.20 above the league average over his career; Willie Mays's range factor was 0.66 above the league average for his career. Aaron played one less season than Mays yet had only six more outfield assists than Mays, who had 1,556 more putouts than Aaron and 19 more double plays. Mays also has a higher difference between his fielding average and the league's than Aaron does (they're separated by a single percentage point, but you look at range factors more than fielding percentages). Mays has more errors but played a far more demanding outfield position than Aaron, and he played in both the absolute most impossible center field in baseball history (the Polo Grounds - it was 483 feet to dead straightaway center field, with the recess of the elevated center field clubhouse and the turf beneath it considered fair playable territory by the ground rules of the park; 460 feet to the fences that framed it) and one of the ten worst (Candlestick Park). They were about equivalent with throwing arms (Aaron is, one admits, a very underrated thrower from the outfield, probably because in his peak time Roberto Clemente was so overwhelming from the position).

Mays also won twelve Gold Gloves (all consecutive), nine more than Aaron ever won (Aaron, it should be said, won his three in consecutive seasons, before Roberto Clemente came of age and all but took title to the award for right fielders for a decade).

Incidentally, Henry Aaron led his league in slugging percentage four times. Pretty damn good, right? Well, Willie Mays led the league five times. Aaron never led his league in on base percentage; Mays, believe it or not, led the league twice, and in seasons when he was passing his absolute peak as a player. Aaron led his league in on base plus slugging combined three times; Mays led the league five times. Each man led the league in home runs four times (would you believe Mike Schmidt led his league in homers eight?); Mays led the league in triples three times, Aaron, never; Mays led the league in stolen bases four times, Aaron, never; Mays had the league's best power/speed number eight times to Aaron's three. Mays has a better lifetime on-base percentage (.384) than Aaron (.374) and a slightly better lifetime slugging percentage (Mays: .557; Aaron, .555). They were pretty similar sluggers in toto; Mays's slugging percentage lifetime is .157 above his league, while Aaron's differential to his league is three points higher. Both men were classic five-tool men, but Mays played in home parks considered less favourable to hitters than Aaron's home parks. Plus, Mays lost two full seasons following his nervous rookie season (1951) to military service, and it is very likely that he and not Aaron would have smashed the Ruth career home run record first had he not lost those seasons. (I've seen one projection that, if he hadn't lost those two seasons, Mays might have finished his career with between 750 and 760 home runs. It isn't exactly an unrealistic projection.)

Henry Aaron was a wonderful baseball player. He was as much of a treat to watch as any man who has ever played the game. But if you're going to fall for the specious enough idea that Willie Mays's cap trick makes him an overrated fielder. It's no less Henry Aaron's fault that he didn't have that acute a sense of entertainment than it is Willie Mays's fault that he did. Incidentally, I am not a Giant fan by any means, even if the first major league baseball game I ever saw was in their old New York stomping grounds - but the infant Mets were the home team. I've been a Mets fan since the day they were born, a Red Sox fan since the 1967 pennant race thriller. I have, really, no institutional or emotional loyalty to the Giants, but I can and do read the records as closely as I can. And the records plus having seen both men play at their peak powers tell me that Willie Mays was a better all-around baseball player than Henry Aaron by a decent if not overwhelming margin, and that Willie Mays was at least a better fielder than Henry Aaron was.

Back to Bob Gibson and Juan Marichal: This may shock you but Marichal actually was the better fielder. Their fielding percentages are dead even (.949), but Gibson's range factor for his position lifetime was 1.80, against his league's 1.98. Marichal's was 2.33 above a league percentage in his years of 1.99. Gibson's main problem, of course, was that pitching motion of his - that sprawling, snap-whipping motion that pulled him off to the first base side in his follow through may have meant a pitcher giving a batter a fit but a fielder who wasn't that likely to get as good a glove up as he could have had. (Jim Bunning, by the way, had an even worse problem in that regard than Gibson - Bunning's corkscrewing sidearm delivery yanked him practically to the first base line on every pitch, making you wonder how he survived long enough to pitch just one no-hitter, never mind a no-no in the American and the perfect game against the Mets in 1964.) Gibson was a better hitter than Marichal (he had, incidentally, almost twice as many total bases as Marichal, with 408). But I noticed an intriguing offencive stat: Gibson lifetime had one more sacrifice bunt than Marichal did.

Because Marichal's teams weren't quite able to get into the World Series, if you judge the Big Games strictly by the World Series we don't have a viable record by which to measure Marichal. His brief stint in the 1962 Series only suggests what might have been, if his teams could have overtaken the 1965 and 1966 Dodgers. Marichal did appear in the 1971 League Championship Series and pitched very well in a 2-1 complete game loss - very well considering he'd already incurred the injury that ultimately finished him off (a penicillin shot for an illness ignited an arthritic condition that may have been building in his back for some years before 1970; he was forced to become a wile-and-guile pitcher, rather than the four-pitch power and craft pitcher he had been, and it may have been a minor miracle that he won 18 games in 1971; he was never the same pitcher after that). To judge Juan Marichal in the World Series we have only his brief stint of four shutout innings in the 1962 Series.

But we can make a measurement of Marichal in big-game pitching in terms of the heat of the pennant race and down the stretch, and Marichal above any righthander of his era pitched his best baseball in the heat of a pennant race; he edges Gibson out in heat-of-the-race pitching, not to mention in heat-of-the-race pitching against the one team his club most needed to beat to stay in the race to the end. (He beat the Dodgers, lifetime, 24 out of 25 times in Candlestick Park, and beat them more often than not when he faced them in Dodger Stadium.)

We're talking about the two greatest righthanded pitchers of the 1960s here. Put them both on your staff and you've got two guaranteed cases of lights out. And I'm going to tell you something else which could get me flamed by others less knowledgeable than you and I - I may not choose either man over Sandy Koufax for the one game I need to win like yesterday, but if Koufax was taken out of the picture and Nolan Ryan was put in, the only way Ryan gets in ahead of Gibson and Marichal is if he buys the team and puts himself into the rotation. Juan Marichal and Bob Gibson were way better pitchers than Nolan Ryan was. (So, incidentally, was Tom Seaver.) But the overall weight of the record, the overall spread of the evidence, favours Marichal over Gibson considerably enough. It doesn't denigrate Gibson to say that he wasn't quite as good as Juan Marichal. And it doesn't denigrate Marichal to say that, thanks to his pitching for better teams, Bob Gibson got the chance to do what Marichal never really got the chance to do - make three World Series his near-exclusive playground. These two men did the best they could with what they had, and it was one hell of a lot better than all but a very few who ever practised the pitcher's art.

"In any case, in view of baseball's attitude towards drug testing up to now, records have lost much of their meaning. Is it the players or is it the drugs?"

Drug testing is irrelevant to records. The past century's advances in the sciences of physical therapy, nutrition and exercise vastly overshadow the effect of illegal steroids. Drugs can give at most a 5%-10% edge—a huge difference when competing against other professional athletes at the top end of modern human performance, but irrelevant for comparison with athletes even as little as 40 years ago. High-school players today are in better physical condition than the pros were back then.

The reason why performance-enhancing drugs are illegal and unethical has nothing to do with "is it the players or is it the drugs." Scientifically designed nutrition, exercise, training and injury-recovery regimens provide 90%+ of a top athlete's performance, and those are perfectly legitimate. The trouble is, at the highest level of competition anything legal that boosts performance is effectively mandatory. It's okay for nutrition and exercise to be mandatory, because those are healthy. Steroids, however, carry severe long-term health risks, while amphetemines have severe short-term dangers. Those must be banned from a sport, because to do otherwise would in effect force players to risk their lives to play.

But from a fan's perspective, drug testing per se is irrelevant. Our interest as fans is simply to see the game played at the highest level of performance; how that is accomplished is a side point. It's the players who benefit from drug testing—and, of course, out of respect and compassion for those players we fans should support drug testing as well. More to the point, though, if the sport bans a performance-enhancing substance, then it is important to the fans that that ban be enforced uniformly, to preserve a level playing field. But as long as baseball's current drug testing system is uniform and accepted by the players, the details or effectiveness of the system shouldn't matter to the fans.

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