A little late...it's probably Friday somewhere, right?
Anyway -- I really thought I was done with this, but I guess it's never going away. I wound up going out today with a Giants hat, and Giants jacket, and a Giants cap, so I wasn't exactly hiding anything. At any rate, I wound up in a conversation with a sales clerk, and within five sentence he was on about asterisks and steroids and the whole nine yards. Giants fans not in the Bay Area, I'm sure, had the same experience with all this stuff that I had here in Texas during the last decade: people really, really, really want to tell you what they think about Barry Bonds. Why? I have no idea. But they sure do.
Anyway, I thought it was all ancient history, but I guess not. The good news was that the other sales clerk I spoke to today wanted to talk about Lincecum's contract, and was hoping he'd wind up on the Rangers eventually, so that was better. Hey, I did very much enjoy watching and rooting for Barry Bonds, but the other stuff is just dull.
Okay I don't think there's much chance Lincecum ends up here, but can you imagine a rotation of:
ReplyDeleteTim Lincecum
Yu Darvish
Neftali Feliz
Derek Holland
Martin Perez
All under 30, too.
I just don't see it happening, even with Michael Young's contract coming off the books after 2013. But a guy can dream.
Its odd, but this post has me thinking that Bonds may not actually end up in the HOF, where I previously thought he was an eventual shoo-in. My prior thought started with, basically, four ways to see Bonds' candidacy:
ReplyDelete1) IN, because we have no reasonable metric to adjust for PED stats,
2) IN, because his achievements are so stupendous that any reasonable PED adjustment still leaves him in the HOF,
3) IN, because - if you believe Game of Shadows - his PED use didn't begin until 1999, thus in 1998 he (cleanly) entered the GOAT conversation by inaugurating the 400/400 club,
4) OUT, because he's a cheater and cheaters never win.
I sort of figured he'd get in cause there seem to be way more people in the first three categories than the fourth, and further the more knowledgeable people also seem to be in the first three categories. Starting to doubt it now though, cause:
a) There's no agreement among insiders on which of the first three categories should be used to evaluate Bonds' candidacy. If you read three baseball experts on the topic, you'll get some version of those three arguments. The pro-Bonds HOF camp is really quite fragmented, and
b) (Politics connection) - the anti-Bonds camp, such as I assume the clerk today - are unified and tend to be very vocal. As such they are a bit like a special interest, like the proverbial ethanol subsidies that the vast majority of us vaguely dislike but a few of us really like - and vote on. Since the anti-Bonds camp is more vocal, and unified, - I dunno, he might actually never get in. Curious.
Came across this today:
ReplyDeletehttp://open.salon.com/blog/andywolf/2012/02/17/gary_carter_succumbs_to_cancer_the_kids_ironic_death
Purports to be a tribute to Gary Carter, but the writer spends much of his article pissing and moaning about Carter's teammates who were druggies and alkies and steroid abusers.