the sporting life

Bosox Barry?

Call me crazy, but is this not the very scenario imagined as the one possible path for Barry Bonds back into baseball?

An American League contender, preferably a big-market team with big-market money, loses a big power hitter to injury and is forced to seriously consider taking on all the many headaches for Bonds' still formidable talents. And so, right on cue, down goes David Ortiz and his big bat (and left handed bat, at that!), for at least a month and maybe for the rest of the season, and the Red Sox have to come up with a Plan B.

All in all, it's the perfect scenario: It's Boston, with no limits on spending and a win-at-all-costs mentality. And it's their DH who's injured, so the disruption would be minimal. Bonds could just slip right into Ortiz's slot without disturbing any other player's place on the field or in the lineup. Barry couldn't have written it up any better.

But what about steroids? Sure, Boston hated Bonds as much as the next city, but that was then and this is now. A lot has changed since last we've seen Bonds: namely, the Mitchell Report. The heat's come way off Bonds as the rest of the country has been forced to face that the Steroids Era was exactly that, an era, and not one man. Boston, especially, has been pressed into a broader perspective, what with Roger Clemens, one of the Red Sox franchise players of the past twenty five years, taking over Bonds' mantle of steroids Whipping Boy. How could they reject Bonds without calling huge chunks of their own history into question?

I attended a Giants - Red Sox game at Fenway in June 2007. The media were all over him for days leading up to the series, the fans let him have it every time he came to the plate...until he homered, and then the park filled with oohs and aahs, because that's what everybody had come to see. The great Barry Bonds, crushing one deep, and you sensed that there would have been disappointment if the game's Home Run King had gone his whole career without homering at majestic Fenway, perhaps baseball's most mythologized showcase theater. Boston knows baseball, they're not blind to its history. They would accept Bonds.

But will the Red Sox bite? Maybe not now, not while there's still hope of Ortiz returning, not while they're still hanging onto a playoff slot. But that playoff spot is looking tenuous, indeed; Boston woke up today 4 full games back of Tampa, just a single game ahead of the surging Twins for the wildcard, and with growing worries that Manny Ramirez's month long slump may be more serious than previously thought. If a month from now the Rays are still growing stronger rather than weaker, if Boston bats are anything less than booming, and if the devastating combination punch of Ortiz/Ramirez still looks as compromised as it does now, you can bet the Boston Barry Buzz will start to take on a life of its own.