Zirin: “It’s Bonds. Barry Bonds”: The Return of Baseball’s Invisible Man

So it’s not the return of Barry Burton to Resident Evil. Damn.

By chanting “Barry”, the fans actually forced the radio and television announcers to acknowledge “the last time a different Barry” heard his name echoed through the park. On the radio broadcast, they acknowledged that this “different Barry” once existed without saying his last name. There was an awkward silence after their observation as if they had spoken out of turn and were about to be chided by a spectral disciplinarian in their midst.

On television, they handled “Barry” a touch differently. Lead Fox Sports announcer Joe Buck commented that fans used to chant Barry “for someone else around here.” Tim McCarver responded, “When Barry Manilow was here at concerts.” People assumed afterward that McCarver had experienced a senior moment of some kind or was just a bit out to lunch.

I don’t buy it.  I believe McCarver’s chuckle, which you can hear immediately after his Manilow line, tells a different story. He was actually making a poorly executed joke about the invisibility of Barry Bonds and at the expense of Barry Bonds. There is a delight that the baseball cognoscenti takes in making Barry Bonds their “invisible man.” It’s a way to marginalize him without confronting what he represents. He’s a home-run king in exile. He’s the end-product of an era where owners made billions selling a steroid-enhanced product. He’s the person who can no longer tell the press to go to hell, because they won’t acknowledge his voice. The press corps once asked Bonds if he thought steroids was cheating. Bonds responded, “Is steroids cheating? You want to define cheating in America? When they make a shirt in Korea for a $1.50 and sell it here for 500 bucks. And you ask me what cheating means?” Now they don’t have to care what he thinks. Now they can humiliate him forever by denying his existence.

It’s so fitting that it was the fans of San Francisco who forced his name onto the airwaves. It’s the city where generations of people traveled to escape the sting of invisibility. It’s the city where shame is treated as the greatest sin of all. It’s the city where Barry Bonds can thumb his nose at the exile of Major League Baseball, and truly be home.