Dodgers fans ride Bonds' asterisk all game long
Editor's note: SportsLine columnist Gregg Doyel watched Barry Bonds' unsuccessful pursuit of home run No. 755 on Tuesday night from various seats around Dodger Stadium.
LOS ANGELES -- The asterisks were cute. Every time Barry Bonds batted Tuesday, a group of 15 fans waved crisp white pieces of paper bearing a big black asterisk.
The Bonds impersonator behind the plate was another nice touch. This guy covered his head with dark brown rubber to mimic Bonds' bald head, wore a San Francisco jersey with Bonds' No. 25 and stuffed the jersey with towels. He was huge. Almost as huge as the real Bonds.
|
|
| These Dodgers fans let Barry know how they feel about his HRs. (AP) |
Not that Bonds' family had to look around to get that message. Listening would have worked, too.
Dodger Stadium lit into Bonds every time he reared his head from the visiting dugout. When he leaned onto the top step, he was booed. When he walked onto the on-deck circle, he was booed. When he jogged to left field he was booed, and as he stood there between pitches he was booed some more.
And when Bonds stood in the batter's box, needing one home run to tie Hank Aaron's all-time record of 755 home runs? Dodger Stadium let him have it.
For Bonds' first at-bat, with two outs in the first inning, Dodgers fans jeered for more than 40 seconds. The crowd was up on its feet -- a standing boo-vation. They stopped booing only to watch Brad Penny's pitch, a strike, which brought a short burst of a cheer.
The crowd resumed booing until the next pitch, and the pattern repeated -- silence, another strike, another short cheer, then more boos until the third pitch. Bonds tried to check his swing, couldn't, and was called out to end the inning. The crowd erupted as Bonds stood on the infield, waiting for center fielder Dave Roberts to bring his hat and glove. While everyone sat down around him, a Dodgers fan behind the Giants dugout rose and waved a T-shirt at Bonds. On the front was a picture of Babe Ruth. On the back, an asterisk.
Bonds wasn't anywhere near intimidated. He stared defiantly into the crowd as he loosened up in the on-deck circle. He smiled at a guy in the first row who was spewing invective. How cold-blooded is Bonds? He let his teenage son, Nikolai -- a Giants bat boy -- wear one of his jerseys. So picture this: As several Giants climbed out of the dugout for the national anthem, a smattering of boos greeted the Bonds who stepped onto the field: Nikolai Bonds.
Barry Bonds didn't get to 754 home runs by caring what outsiders think. He walked into the Giants' smallish clubhouse three hours before the game, saw the enormous media contingent waiting for him and changed into a shirt that flaunted his controversial physique. On the back his shirt read, "Winners don't wait for chances ... they take them." On the front was a flexed arm with the letters "SF" inside its enormous biceps, and below that the words, "Strength and conditioning." The federal government has spent years trying to discover exactly what bodybuilding chances Bonds may have taken.
I tried to get him to speak before the game, but Bonds wasn't having any of it. He interrupted my opening salvo like so: "Shhh -- I don't want to talk today." He proceeded to sort through the bats in his leather bat bag, picking them up and putting them down until he settled on three. Then he picked through the remaining bats before grabbing two more. They all looked the same, but to a hitting savant like Bonds, each bat must be a unique snowflake.
Outside it was hot and steamy, although the crowd of 56,000 missed a chance to turn up the heat. Instead of marshaling its resources and choosing a single chant, pockets of fans went their own way. Some preferred "steroids, steroids." Others went for "juice-juice-juice-juice" or "cheater, cheater." This was not an inventive crowd. Just an angry one.
