"The greatest hitter of all-time?"

Regardless of what you hear about Barry Bonds in the news today. He is one of the most hated figure in sports and with the spotlight on him now, he may have over taken Terrell Owens for that vaunted seat. I've never met Barry Bonds in person, I've heard he can be nice, but mostly that he's arrogant, self centered, and just flat out an assh*le to everyone around him. The baseball writers who follow the Giants and Barry Bonds have been his enemy since he was a kid watching how the press treated his Dad, Bobby Bonds. From the first interview he did when he was an up and coming ballplayer he treated the press with paranoia and resentment. He wanted to cut the press out of his life once he became a story, that way he wouldn't get abused by them like his father did. But as we can tell now, it didn't work since everyone in the media hates Barry. The media hates him with mostly valid reasons because Bonds treated them rudely and less than human.  It seems like a self-fulfilling prophecy, he cut off the press because he doesn't want to get torched by them, but the media now hates him because of his attitude towards them. Ok, so Barry Bonds isn't going to win any Roberto Clemente Awards for good will towards men or his work in the local community. Here's the funny thing about all those negative things associated with Barry Bonds. It doesn't matter because he's a Baseball player, not a politician or a peace corps volunteer. He gets paid to entertain people with his skills in between the white lines, not what he does after he leaves AT&T Park. Ok, ok you say, but what about the issue he's facing now? Oh, that steroids thing huh? Well here's my take on it "Romey", since every ballplayer was on steroids these past decades (including pitchers) that means there was a level playing field.  Before he died, Ken Caminiti claimed that 50% of MLB players were using Steroids and in Jose Canseco's book he claims 80% used steroids. So even if you split the difference at 60% that means over half of all MLB players were using Steroids and remember that includes pitchers as well. Barry Bonds from '98 on when he allegedly started using steroids Barry passed his best season home run total twice. Once was of course his amazing 73 home run season in '01 and 49 in the previous season. If you throw out the high of 73 and the low of 5 home runs, he averages 39 home runs a season. Now after seeing that only three players including Bonds hit 60 or more homeruns during this "Steroid Era" with somewhere around 60% of the MLB players on the juice. He did this while being under tremendous media scrutiny, the pressures of MLB history, and while only seeing three pitches a game that slightly graze the strike zone. But when he did see those few pitches, he crushed those mistakes into McCovey Cove.   He's close to passing Babe Ruth's career home run mark and when he does people will say he shouldn't have that record since Ruth didn't steroids. Wait did Ruth face the best competition in the world at the time he played? Obviously not, since he never faced a black pitcher during his heyday, he didn't play night games and he didn't have to play series on the west coast. I could go on about the discrepancies of the two era's, but we all know the differences. Baseball should take away Bonds records because they're tainted. So if that has to happen where will it stop? For the past several decades players used "greenies" which is an amphetamine. Greenies "juice" up players with more than just a Starbucks espresso, it one of the most destructive drugs to the body. Amphetamine's are one of the drugs that's destroying the youth culture in America. So I guess those players were just trying to get an edge right. It doesn't matter that the player who just legged out a triple to get into scoring position and eventually score off a suicide squeeze to win game #1 of the World series. MLB screwed up, they screwed up bad. They needed something to give that spark to the game of baseball again and Mark McGuire & Sammy Sosa provided that.  Bud Selig knew, everyone in baseball knew that they might not be doing that all natural. They all looked away from the issue and just counted the profits they got because of players sudden pop in their bat. If we really want to tear apart the record book because of unfair advantages then we should just burn it to be fair.  How many more wins would Cy Young have if he was able to study every hitters at bat with video footage? How many more wins would Roger Clemens have if he never had to pitch against non-white batters? If you draw any conclusion from this, it should be that Barry Bonds is the greatest hitter of all-time.  We should stop, look and enjoy seeing him do what no other human can do, because he's not going to be around for many more seasons. We need to realize that what we're seeing is living history. Beneath all that resentment and disdain for Bonds among baseball writers because he treated them badly, they know in their gut, he's the best baseball player they've ever seen. Evan Bunnell would love to be a contributor and writer for www.ign.com or www.foxsports.com and does write his own "Iron Bunny" Blog.