A request for the pitchers who will face Barry Bonds this year:
Knock him down.
Every time he comes to the plate.
Despite the mountain of evidence portraying Bonds as a steroid abuser of either tragic or comic proportions, depending on your perspective (beef steroids?), it's unlikely powerless Baseball Commissioner Bud Selig will even investigate the charges raised in "Game of Shadows," a book by two San Francisco Chronicle reporters scheduled to hit bookstores later this month.
The players themselves, however, don't need Selig or anyone else to enforce what should be a zero-tolerance policy regarding cheating.
If most players stop and gaze after belting a home run, they can expect to wind up on the ground during the next at-bat, the well-understood penalty for showing up the pitcher.
Standing and staring, though, should barely qualify as a misdemeanor compared to Bonds' half-decade ritual of injections, pills, creams and God knows what else on the scale of baseball ethics.
I know, I know. Everyone's innocent until proven guilty. And Bonds, who is only seven home runs away from tying Babe Ruth for second place behind Hank Aaron on the all-time home-run list, hasn't been charged with anything yet.
But he's guilty.
Charges of tax evasion are likely to arise from an ex-girlfriend's allegations that he bought her a house in Arizona using money from card-signing shows that he never declared. The court of public opinion is already weighing in at the rate of about a million to one against Musclehead. And, according to an excerpt from "Game of Shadows" published by "Sports Illustrated" magazine last week, sexual dysfunction has been one of the side effects counterbalancing all those home runs.
None of those possible punishments address Bonds' greatest offenses, though -- the crimes he committed against the game. For those he should answer every time he comes to the plate this season in what will be the most distasteful record chase of all time.
Bonds' bloated skull, perhaps the most incontrovertible visible evidence of his juicing, makes for an easy enough target. In his last full season (the toll steroids take on the body caused him to miss most of 2005, just as Mark McGwire spent the end of his career as an inflexible freak), pitchers walked him at a record rate, anyway.
So instead of lobbing four tosses wide of the plate each time he comes up, why not simply aim for the other side of the plate and put some heat on it? If one happens to plunk him, there's no more damage done than an intentional walk. Watching Bonds pick himself up off the ground 15 or 20 times a game would certainly be more enjoyable than enduring yet another counterfeit home run into the bay.
Not that I'm encouraging Major-League hurlers to intentionally hurt Bonds or anything. Just requesting a little chin music. Then again, Bonds didn't worry about the possibility that one of his steroid-fueled shots would smash in the face of a pitcher unfortunate enough to face him, ending a career or possibly a life. So why should they be too concerned about bouncing one off that well-protected skull of his?
Besides, one of the "benefits" of human-growth hormone, one of the many substances Bonds allegedly used in his jealousy-inspired medication ritual, is improved eyesight. So he should see the knockdown pitches coming even better than the average player, right?
In a perfect world, pitchers would follow this advice and Bonds would get so sick of being thrown at and mercilessly booed that he'd simply walk away from the game, retreating into what must be a torturous, demon-filled private life.
Never the most pleasant of fellows, since embarking on the needle-filled body-building portion of his career after the 1998 season, Bonds has become an insufferable jerk, complaining about something with just about every public utterance -- usually the media. His artificial assault on the record books has been inspired largely by a beef with Ruth, a man who died in 1948.
That, and steroids. Reportedly.
Imagine what the pitchers of the Bambino's era, who weren't playing for eight-figure, no-trade contracts, would have done if they found out one of their peers had fouled the game to such a perverse degree.
Their mound-dwelling successors should do no less. €€€
In January 2005, almost a year before a Nevada judge ordered his suspension from boxing lifted, Joe Mesi sized up the rest of the current heavyweight division during an interview with the Niagara Falls Reporter.
"If this were the 1970s, when the Top 15 guys were all great, I probably would go home," Mesi said. "But it's all about timing, and I could be on top right now."
His first comeback fight, a tuneup against 41-year-old journeyman Ron Bellamy, is scheduled for April 1 in Puerto Rico. There's little for Mesi to prove in that bout, other than his assertion that he's at no greater risk to sustain another subdural hematoma than any other fighter, despite multiple brain bleeds after his win against Vassiliy Jirov more than two years earlier.
Mesi's analysis of the top heavyweights will be tested over the next six weeks, with three of the four "world" titles to be contested.
The first of the three title fights is the most intriguing. Mesi made his assessment when Vitali Klitschko was "Ring" magazine's heavyweight champion, a title more credible than all the sanctioning bodies combined.
After a series of injuries delayed his scheduled defense against Hasim Rahman, though, Klitschko retired late last year. The World Boxing Council gave his belt to Rahman, but the true world title remains vacant.
Rahman's first defense will be the first step toward changing that. On Saturday, March 18, he faces James Toney. The one-time middleweight champion won the World Boxing Association's heavyweight bauble last year with a one-sided beating of John Ruiz.
Toney was stripped of the belt after testing positive for steroids. Unlike Bonds, he at least offered a somewhat plausible defense -- that he'd been prescribed the drugs to help recover from a torn muscle in his arm, rather than to beef up, a fairly reasonable explanation if you saw his paunch on fight night. He said he took them believing that he wouldn't fight until after they were out of his system, but that his fight against Ruiz had been pushed up by more than two months.
"If I'm the poster boy for steroids, steroids is going out of business," Toney said after being stripped of his title.
Rahman defines the term "paper champion," and not only because he was handed the title by WBC officials. Since knocking out Lennox Lewis in April 2001, he lost the rematch to Lewis, was stopped by a faded Evander Holyfield when a hematoma on his forehead grew to the size of an orange, drew with David Tua and somehow managed to lose a decision to Ruiz before embarking on a winning streak compiled mainly against nobodies.
His best win was a 12-round decision last August over Monte Barrett, who lost to Mesi in late 2003.
Toney, a vastly superior boxer, shouldn't have too much problem confusing and frustrating Rahman on his way to a clear decision win.
On the same night Mesi makes his return, World Boxing Organization beltholder Lamon Brewster is scheduled to defend against Serguei Lyakhovich of Belarus.
Lyakhovich (22-1, 14 KOs) stopped James Walton in eight rounds on the undercard of Mesi's first-round demolition of DaVarryl Williamson at HSBC Arena in 2003, but hasn't fought since edging Dominick Guinn in December 2004.
The fight, Brewster's fourth defense of the WBO belt, will be held in Cleveland, the city's first heavyweight title fight in the area since Gerrie Coetzee knocked out Michael Dokes in 10 rounds for the WBA crown in 1983.
Brewster's punching power will overwhelm the inexperienced Lyakhovich, who has never fought a Top-10 contender, by the eighth round.
Wladimir Klitschko, from whom Brewster ripped the WBO belt with a fifth-round knockout in 2004, challenges Chris Byrd for the International Boxing Federation title on April 22 in Manheim, Germany.
Though Byrd's defensive style makes for some dull fights, he deserves credit for facing the younger Klitschko brother, who knocked him down twice en route to a 12-round decision in 2000. But even friendly German judges won't help the erratic giant as Byrd avenges the earlier defeat.
| Niagara Falls Reporter | www.niagarafallsreporter.com | March 14 2006 |