Unless you’re a San Francisco Giants fan, you have to consider that Barry Bonds is one the most hated players in baseball history.
Years after his playing days passed him by, leaving behind a tarnished power-hitting legacy that should have been much more revered, Bonds is now coming to the realization he wasted time embracing being the bad guy.
Every sport needs a bad guy and Bonds became baseball’s. As he was chasing home run records, Bonds laughed in the face of critics and challenged all those who questioned him. After seeing Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa become national darlings with their home run chase years prior, Bonds received quite the opposite reception as he went on a slugging crusade that would end with a single-season home run record and the all-time home run record, asterisks be damned.
Bonds could have had a much different reception from the game and its fans, but he chose to dig in and embrace being the one everyone hated. He was a one-man N.W.O. in Major League Baseball, and it seemed as though he was fine with it. If he could do it all over again, however, he probably would have played things differently.
“I’m to blame for the way I was [portrayed], because I was a dumbass,” Bonds said in a featured story on Sports on Earth. “I was straight stupid, and I’ll be the first to admit it. I mean, I was just flat-out dumb. What can I say? I’m not going to try to justify the way I acted toward people. I was stupid.”
Bonds was seen as the symbol of all that wrong with baseball once the world realized the love affair with McGwire and Sosa may have been drug-aided. He may have been too blindsided by the lack of love that followed him compared to the attention given to others, and perhaps that rubbed him the wrong way. At the time, however, Bonds was a bit younger and more brash about his standing in the baseball world, and therefore he lacked the perspective to see how he was being viewed from afar.
“It wasn’t an image that I invented on purpose,” Bonds said. “It actually escalated into that, and then I maintained it. You know what I mean? It was never something that I really ever wanted. No one wants to be treated like that, because I was considered to be a terrible person. You’d have to be insane to want to be treated like that. That makes no sense.”
Looking at how Bonds is treated now as a hitting coach with the Miami Marlins, and with the benefit of a much healthier relationship with the media, Bonds sees the error in his ways and laughs about the missed opportunities that passed him by because he bought into his own bad boy image.
“Hell, I kick myself now, because I’m getting great press [since being more cooperative], and I could have had a trillion more endorsements, but that wasn’t my driving force. The problem was, when I tried to give in a little bit, it never got better. I knew I was in the midst of that image, and I determined at that point that I was never going to get out of it.
“So I just said, ‘I’ve created this fire around me, and I’m stuck in it, so I might as well live with the flames.'”
Things could have turned out much different for Bonds. He had the smile. He had the laugh. He had it all as a player. Before taking to certain enhancement methods, Bonds could have gone down in baseball lore more like Willie Mays or Ken Griffey, Jr. instead of Sammy Sosa and Rafael Palmeiro.
