Dorks And Losers

Barry Bonds hit home run num­ber 756 last night against the Wash­ing­ton Nation­als. Hank Aaron had a spe­cial video trib­ute, and poor Bud Selig was not in attendance.

Other news, A-Rod joined the exclu­sive 500 HR club a few days ago. And Tom Glavine become prob­a­bly the last mem­ber of the ultra exclu­sive 300 win club. In today’s game, it’s a lot harder for a start­ing pitcher to get a W than it is for joe schmo to hit a base­ball over a 350 foot fence.

A few funny lines from a few ESPN.com articles.

1. Arti­cle about the great stand-up guys in base­ball today. Col­orado short­stop Troy Tulow­itzki appar­ently can’t stop think­ing about Derek Jeter.

Tulow­itzki is a con­nois­seur of great short­stop play. He used to carry base­ball cards of Nomar Gar­ci­a­parra and Derek Jeter in his uni­form pocket in trib­ute, and he wears No. 2 in honor of Jeter. Tulow­itzki has such a man-crush on Jeter, the Rock­ies jok­ingly pur­chased bot­tles of “Dri­ven” cologne and dabbed it on before a series against the Yan­kees in June.

There’s noth­ing wrong with man crushes.

2. An arti­cle pro­ject­ing career home run totals for a few top slug­gers like Adam Dunn and Albert Pujols.

Rodriguez has estab­lished a 21-percent chance of hit­ting 900 home runs — more than Oh, even — and a 7-percent chance of hit­ting 1,000 home runs.

The funny thing that 7 per­cent chance of hit­ting 1,000 home runs is sur­pris­ingly plau­si­ble given A-Rod’s extra­or­di­nary talent.

3. Buster Olney on Barry Bonds and the Mitchell investigation.

Writ­ten this here before and will write it again. If Bonds is sin­gled out and turns out to be just one of a hand­ful of guys men­tioned specif­i­cally in the final report gen­er­ated by the Mitchell inves­ti­ga­tion, this whole thing is going to come off like the worst pos­si­ble case of scapegoating.

Bonds is only sin­gled out for two reasons:

1. His name is now next to the biggest sta­tis­tic in all of sports.
2. His per­son­al­ity is SO unlike­able that every­one likes to hate him. But that also is a digg on Bonds who could have years ago tried to change the stigma/attitude around him.

All in all — in 25 years, he will be looked at as a great base­ball player.

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