Bonds Leaves Lasting Mark With No. 756 (*)

(The * is mine, not George Vecsey's)

By GEORGE VECSEY

Published: August 8, 2007

It’s his record. Barry Bonds earned it with 756 disciplined swings. Let’s give him a pass the way a thousand pitchers did. For one day, let’s call a truce, the way the generals did in ancient Greece when athletes were headed to Olympia.

Now he can celebrate the awesome feat of breaking Henry Aaron’s career record with his 756th home run, off Mike Bacsik of Washington last night, in front of his family and supportive fans, with a gracious taped congratulation from Aaron on the message board. It was his night.

Nobody — and certainly not some chemist in a white smock — swung the bat for Bonds against objects moving 80 or 90 or 100 miles an hour. He had to do that himself, with the superb reflexes he had as a cocky stripling, and the craft he acquired as a smug and enlarged elder.

No matter what anybody thinks about Bonds as a person, he walked out to home plate with a bat in his hand and some new-wave padding on his arms, and goodness knows what in his system, and he propelled baseballs into the briny deep.

It’s his record. What is baseball going to do, come up with some magic formula to pare down his home run totals? They are all his, every one of them. Victor Conte of notorious Balco didn’t hit them. Greg Anderson, the trainer guarding Bonds’s secrets in a California jail, didn’t hit them. The people who made money off Bonds and the union officials who blocked testing didn’t hit the home runs. Barry Bonds hit them, all 756 of them.

He did not do it with some wild Gorman Thomas-Rob Deer swing-from-your-butt, do-or-die lunge, but with the measured, disciplined stroke of a martial-arts master. He was self-contained. He knew what he was doing. He didn’t go out and get the ball with the jazz-improvisation genius of Yogi Berra (off his shoe tops) or Roberto Clemente (up around his eyebrows). He hypnotized the pitcher. He slowed down time.

Never mind the comparisons to Aaron or Babe Ruth. Bonds set this record with the latter-day arrogance and patience of Ted Williams: My pitches come to me. If you start giving the pitchers an eighth of an inch off the plate, those devious so-and-sos will start taking a quarter of an inch, and you can’t have that.

What a swing. I was reminded of his purposefulness in 2002, when Bonds played in his first World Series. Every time No. 25 came to the plate, like a lion tamer or a horse whisperer, he would concentrate on the essentials. No waving the bat over his head, no flexing, no strutting. Just a short stroke. Look into my eyes.

Seated in the far reaches of auxiliary press boxes, where they stick the likes of me in the postseason, I couldn’t take my eyes off that stroke. Even from deep right field or deep left field, he looked like a master carpenter hammering on expensive wood — thwack, thwack, thwack — no dents, no deviations.

Often the star of a World Series is a decent player who gets hot at the right time, but Bonds dominated that Series as few superstars ever have: seven games, 8 for 17, six runs batted in, three strikeouts and four home runs. He would have hit more, except that the Angels walked him 13 times, 7 of them intentionally.

Pitchers are still working around him, even though his body has thickened and stiffened at 43. He looks nothing like the smart-aleck kid, the son of Bobby Bonds, the godson of Willie Mays, indoctrinated early that the world was against him, carrying that chip of insolence into the Pittsburgh clubhouse, where he challenged Jim Leyland, one of the square shooters. Teammates would roll their eyes, but the kid could play. Then he moved on to his destiny in San Francisco.

The book “Game of Shadows,” by the San Francisco Chronicle reporters Lance Williams and Mark Fainaru-Wada, pretty much describes what a cold, manipulative person Bonds is. The book suggests he committed perjury to a grand jury and perhaps also failed to report cash income from collectible shows. It describes his relationship to Balco, before baseball and the union were finally shamed into accepting testing.

So far the tests have caught mostly fringe guys trying to earn that million-dollar season that will provide for their families. A lot of the positive tests were by pitchers trying to buy some muscle on their fastball. How many of the 756 home run pitchers were juiced? You think Barry Bonds was picking on innocents?

The Giants’ front office painted itself into a corner, using its stash to retain Bonds, and the old man has been laboring in recent weeks. He’s hardly the player who dominated nearly two decades, a first-ballot Hall of Fame no-brainer, no matter what he used.

He will never outdistance all the footnotes and asterisks and doubts and suspicions in our minds, but Barry Bonds hit those homers, all 756 of them. It’s his record.

E-mail: geovec@nytimes.com

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For Bonds, Swings of Mood and Bats

By SELENA ROBERTS

Published: July 29, 2007

SAN FRANCISCO

His pendulum mood swings can be hypnotic. Back and forth Barry Bonds went Friday night after he moved to one home run behind Hank Aaron, swaying from edgy to indifferent, from introspective to terse, from clarity to confusion.

You feel yourself getting sleepy, very sleepy.

This is what Bonds does to people, even those close to him. He wears them down, leaves them spent. There is an attrition factor to Bonds’s inner circle of supporters that apparently includes the Giants’ owner, Peter Magowan. He remains devoted to his most lucrative ballpark draw but appeared almost fatigued when describing the drain Bonds’s record pursuit has put on the rest of the Giants.

“I think we’ll start winning more consistently once this is behind us,” Magowan said.

You put fender benders and bad dates behind you, but historic journeys?

Magowan longs for the end. The Giants crave closure. But the one Bonds confidant who could have expedited or terminated what has been a slow-drip plod toward the inevitable statistical sham is behind razor wire. Greg Anderson has been cut off from his A-list client, imprisoned across the San Francisco Bay in Dublin, Calif., since November for refusing to divulge for the feds the secret recipe behind Bonds’s body.

His loyalty is baseball’s loss. If Anderson had chosen to dish dirt instead of peeling prison potatoes, a grand jury would most likely have handed up an indictment against Bonds, allowing Commissioner Bud Selig at least an opportunity to keep Aaron’s record safe.

His loyalty is also Bonds’s loss. Anderson’s eight-month absence from the scene — actually, it’s about a year given the three months he served in prison for steroid distribution in connection with the Bay Area Laboratory Co-Operative — has paralleled the sporadic breakdowns of Bonds’s body.

Basically, Bonds has about the same work week as some flight attendants — three days on, two days off — and without the duty to be friendly. Throughout his cranky season, Bonds has performed with striking agility in one game and in need of WD-40 during the next.

Or maybe he simply requires a good hit of flaxseed oil. Whatever Anderson once provided Bonds as his personal trainer — a workout regimen or steroid solutions (bingo!) — the missing ingredients to the youth potions have left the expandable slugger without the reliability of resilience.

•

“Forget the steroid allegations for a moment,” said Victor Conte, Balco’s founder, in an e-mail reply last week. “I believe that Barry Bonds received great benefit from routinely being trained by Greg Anderson. People seem to think athletes can simply take steroids and improve their performance. Steroids don’t significantly enhance muscle size and strength by themselves.”

With Anderson by his side, Bonds ballooned and took off, without looking his age as he neared 40 with spring in his cleats. Now, at 43, Bonds has been aging as if photographed by time-lapse cameras. His size is still formidable as an everyday sighting, but the elasticity of his limbs and levitating power of his swing come and go.

“It’s my understanding that Barry didn’t weight train with anywhere near the same level of intensity before he began working with Greg Anderson,” Conte added.

“It’s my opinion that the effectiveness of Greg’s weight-training methods took Barry to an entirely new level of explosive strength. It’s also likely that having Greg as an everyday trainer helped Barry maintain a higher level of overall strength throughout the season and be less prone to injury.”

Bonds is more vulnerable without Anderson in many ways. Anderson was not only his daily trainer, but also his tolerant friend amid an ever-shrinking network of those who can endure the whiplash of Bonds’s mood swings.

Was Barry’s 754th home run a relief or a burden? It was difficult to tell.

At first, Bonds was not sure what sentiments to assign to the moment he came one home run short of tying Aaron. “It’s very hard to explain right,” he said, “because I can’t really tell you every emotion that’s going in my body right now and everything that’s going on.”

A few minutes later, this brief bout of reflection jackknifed into indifference when Bonds was asked about his fist-pumped reaction as he began his home run trot. “I wasn’t caught up in the moment,” he said.

This is Bonds. He all at once fights fame and courts it, recoils against attention and feeds off it. The contradictions are wearisome to everyone but him. He has no plans to stop, no matter how far ahead of Aaron he may be.

•

“My last season is every last year of my contract,” Bonds said. “I’ve had a bunch of those last seasons, but this is not going to be my last season. I don’t think so — as a Giant or in baseball.”

What makes Bonds think he has enough resilience in reserve to keep going? Some day, Anderson will be released.

E-mail: selenasports@nytimes.com

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Is He There Yet?

By GEORGE VECSEY

Published: July 24, 2007

San Francisco

Watching elderly athletes stretch seems to be in vogue these days. First there was the aching David Beckham on the sideline Saturday, then there was Barry Bonds in the dugout Sunday, and last night, Bonds was girding his ancient hamstrings before swinging a bat in earnest.

After a day’s rest, Bonds was back in the lineup, hoping to add to his 753 career home runs, 2 away from tying Henry Aaron’s record. He was facing Aaron’s principal team, the Braves, as the Giants began a seven-game homestand.

Everything was in place as the great man strapped on his copious body armor and flexed his thick muscles, one day short of his 43rd birthday. There were the kayakers out in the bay, there were the foot-soldier souvenir hunters patrolling the walkway behind right field, and there were the hometown fans, rooting for Bonds, who arrived in the clubhouse at 4:39 p.m. while most of his teammates were already out on the field stretching.

Bonds does not normally indulge in group stretching, but Manager Bruce Bochy seemed unperturbed, saying, “He always hits with his group,” meaning Bonds doesn’t miss batting practice.

Totally missing from the scene was Bud Selig, the commissioner of baseball, who had far more important things to do than sit around and wait for Bonds to deliver his record-breaking home run.

In his own dithering way, Selig has been going around for months with a sour look as Bonds approached the record — the public face of consternation, like the disapproving scowl on the mask of a skeptical character in a Japanese Noh theater morality play.

•

The plaintive whaddaya-want-from-me bleats from Everyman Bud have become the Greek chorus for all of us who believe that Bonds used steroids and other illegal pharmaceutical aids and masking agents, then told wild tales about it to a grand jury, and, besides, is not a very nice person.

A large cadre of people, including yours truly, maintain the position, “We know the deal,” but now there is not much left to do but hope for the inevitable No. 756, the sooner the better.

Selig himself is staying away from San Francisco this week. Given the exorbitant fares and swarms of passengers (Is there a rule that Americans have to wear shorts and clogs on airplanes? Are we really barbarians?) and frequent delays and the rather vicious lack of amenities on the airlines this summer, Bud is a wise man to stay home in Milwaukee and sign official documents, or count paper clips, or whatever he is doing. He will head to Cooperstown, N.Y., for the Hall of Fame inductions this weekend, and how nice for him.

I get to watch creaky athletes stretch. Nothing wrong with that, since wannabe jocks just may learn something. On Saturday night in Southern California, we watched Beckham pad out to the substitutes’ bench on his injured left ankle.

With ESPN having committed the annual gross national product of Ghana on camera crews, Beckham justified their investment by limbering up in the 65th minute, needing only 13 minutes of ankle-flexing and hip-swiveling and knee-raising to loosen up his 32-year-old body.

Then he scampered about the field for 12 minutes of minor action but was unable to avoid one zealous Chelsea sub who almost ruined Major League Soccer’s $32.5 million investment with one unnecessarily rough tackle. The stretching, however, had made Beckham loosey-goosey enough to walk away from that wreck.

Bonds, who is 11 years older than Beckham, was given a day off after two unproductive games in Milwaukee. Assuming that was not some body double wearing his No. 25 uniform in the dugout, he gazed at the antics on the field.

By this time, I was in San Francisco. The Giants’ game was on television, and the cameras caught Bonds doing some minimalist calisthenics for a potential pinch-hitting role. Using a bat as a prop, he squatted on the interior stairway, working on the hammies and all the other muscles that have mysteriously expanded in his athletic old age.

Given his magnificent baseball intelligence and superb swing, Bonds is a threat to hit a home run at any time. There was plenty of anticipatory drama in his every twitch. But even with two men on base in the eighth inning, Bochy played the percentages by using a right-handed pinch-hitter, with Mr. Balco himself right there, while my television screen gently wept.

Enough of this. What else do you do on a fine Sunday afternoon in July but take a stroll to North Beach and order up a plate of rigatoni and buy a book at City Lights and take a cable car and thoroughly enjoy being back in the city that calls itself The City. Mille grazie, Barry.

Now go stretch. And get this over with.

E-mail: geovec@nytimes.com

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