Bonds

deldad,
The insight and thought within the posts you make are so amazingly poignant for me...this one just one of many.
One terrific part of the game experience that occurs with the Giants and in AT&T is the focus and attention on former players.
Bonds was invited back on Tuesday, threw out the first ball and seemed to love the situation.
Wednesday night the focus was on the 80's/early 90's group of players, Robbie Thompson, Will Clark and Matt Williams.
Last night, Mays, McCovey and Cepeda.
As it relates to Willie and Bonds, Willie, almost to a "fault" with some, stands behind Bonds every step of the way. He is staunch supporter and cherishes his role as Barry's God Father.
For those who have seen Ken Burns' "The 10 inning," it really made me think along the lines of the observations you have made.
It can be very difficult as a "fan" to separate Bonds as a player from whatever choices he made along the way. The more I think about it, the more I wonder if I "selectively" choose the issues over which I tend to make judgments about the choices.
I also find it can be easier to make the "judgments" about Bonds choices, whatever they may have been, while forgetting what the Mitchell report says, and what was so obvious, about the extent of the knowledge in baseball and who turned their head and eyes while the $$$$$$$$ rolled in that "saved" baseball.

I feel like Bonds gets treated very poorly compared to many other players. Sure he was a dick a lot of time but in regards to the steroid issue he was s big fish in an even bigger pond. There are countless numbers of athletes who took steroids, PEDs, whatever you wanna call em. A person can compare Bonds with many other known steroid takers and compare how they were treated. Let's compare Bonds and Pettitte.

So we know that both took PEDs. Bonds repeatedly denied his usage at first but then went under the guise of "unknowingly" taking them. Pettitte owned up to his mistakes and moved on. Just to go off on a tangent for a minute, I don't feel like Pettitte or any player for that matter is any better because they owned up to their mistakes. They did not own up because they felt bad about it; they did it because they got caught and wanted to save face. Bonds is now treated poorly compared to Pettitte still being treated fairly generously.

If we are going to set these standards by which our athletes are measured, we should apply them universally and without bias. No matter if they apologized or not, they are all the same, CHEATERS. It's almost not fair how some players get a slide whereas others are used as a sacrificial lamb. Barry Bonds, no matter what you think of him, was one of the greatest players off all time in an era scarred by scandal. He is a dime a dozen in terms of his usage but a jewel in terms of his playing ability.

Absolutely belongs in the hall of fame. I trust parents to explain what all the fuss was about regarding PEDs. It's hypocritical to keep Bonds out of the Hall of Fame, the same writers who glorified the homerun chase will refuse to vote for him even though their closets are full of skeletons too. Bonds hung his skeletons right out in the open.

I will tell my kid that Barry Bonds was the best baseball player that I ever watched. If he was using performance enhancing drugs, he dominated in an era when most of the players were using performance enhancing drugs. Just look at his stats during that time period. He was a one man wrecking crew in a sport that usually does not allow them as an offensive player.

Deldad, not only was Barry Bonds not the greatest player of all time, he wasn't the greatest PLAYER mentioned in your first sentence. I'll chalk it up to youth.

Bonds used to live around the corner from me; during his time there he was very nice to all the neighborhood kids. However, I thought it was strange that during the third game of the 2002 World Series he spent the afternoon prior to the game with several moving vans. He moved out of his house during the world series; which I always thought was strange.