How Important Is It To Care About Bonds?

Hey, we made it five posts in today before any Barry Bonds posts. We want some credit for that.

ESPN is reporting that Bonds has left camp in Arizona to "attend to personal matters" in Los Angeles; the Giants emphasized that it was a previously scheduled trip and had nothing to do with the Sports Illustrated. ESPN's coverage of this story has been curious, to say the least; the Bonds story was the second story on the CBS Evening News last night, which, strangely, was the exact same position it held on SportsCenter.

The issue has been raised, of course, whether we should really care about all of this, whether it really matters if someone uses steroids. We think it's a good point — the whole dewy-eyed business of "purity of the game" seems an insistance from a generation earlier than ours — but Bonds, still, seems like an extreme case. In fact, there's something almost Shakespearean about Bonds. Blessed with otherworldly talent, relentless self-regard and a destructive need to dominate everyone at everything, Bonds has never done anything than simply be Barry Bonds. That was what made him great, and that was what could do him in. Though we don't think that's what made him dress up like Paula Abdul; we have no idea what made him do that.

Bonds Exposed [SI.com]

(By the way, this whole thing could help stave off the apocalypse.)