Love Me, Hate Me: Barry Bonds and the Making of an Antihero Review

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Love Me, Hate Me: Barry Bonds and the Making of an Antihero ReviewIf he's not more careful, Jeff Pearlman's going to get a reputation as the Kitty Kelley of baseball. First, the John Rocker interview in "Sports Illustrated". Next, "The Bad Guys Won!" -- a book about the hard-drinkin', coke-snortin' '86 Mets. Now, Barry Bonds is revealed in all his misanthropic, beef 'roid injectin' misery.
I'm not sure if "Love Me, Hate Me" began life as an impartial look at how Bonds' stellar on-field accomplishments redeemed his tumultuous personal life. Somehow, I doubt it. I suspect it was always intended to be a sarcastic look at how one of the most physically talented ballplayers of the last quarter-century managed to trash his public reputation and make exactly zero friends along the way.
Pearlman knows his baseball, and chooses his comparisons with great precision. His writing is crisp and lively, his point never in doubt. For example, he describes Bonds' infamous late-season and playoff slumps by comparison to late 1970s utility infielders -- the kind of references that only a guy in his mid 30s who grew up with shoeboxes full of Topps baseball cards could come up with: Bonds is described, during his slumps, as being: "... as useful to baseball as an autographed Otto Velez jersey". And: "In April and May, he was Willie Mays; in September, he was Tom Veryzer". This book is probably going to drive the average sabermetrician crazy.
In order to get away with a book like this, the author has to do two things right. He has to get his game accounts perfect. How many baseball bios have been trashed by a lack of research into game details? Ken Kaiser's biography, Andre Dawson's biography, Jose Canseco's love letter to steroids, to name three other baseball books I've reviewed. A look at RetroSheet, however, shows that Pearlman gets it right. He did his research, he watched the key games. That should be a given for any book, but it's not, so he gets points.
The other thing the author has to get right is to check his sources. How do we know that the stories in this book aren't bogus? When you interview 500 people, many of whom knew Bonds only in passing, you're likely to get some suspect information, or anecdotes altered by conscious or unconscious bias. Of course, story after story about how poorly Bonds treated teammates and neighbors is balanced by other stories about his generosity and heart, so not every interviewee is out to get Bonds. The chapter notes also detail hundreds of primary sources -- mostly contemporary newspaper game accounts or the musings of sports columnists (many of which, such as the paeans to Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa in 1998, look painfully naive in retrospect).
"Love Me, Hate Me" is hardly neutral or impartial. However, it has the ring of authenticity, and is written in the same breezy, in-your-face style that made "The Bad Guys Won!" a blast. It's unfortunate that, as of today, there are about 5700 other books that are outselling this one on Amazon. Love this book or hate this book, you should not avoid this book.Love Me, Hate Me: Barry Bonds and the Making of an Antihero Overview
No player in the history of baseball has left such an indelible mark on the game as San Francisco Giants outfielder Barry Bonds. In his twenty-year career, Bonds has amassed an unprecedented seven MVP awards, eight Gold Gloves, and more than seven hundred home runs, an impressive assortment of feats that has earned him consideration as one of the greatest players the game has ever seen. Equally deserved, however, is his reputation as an insufferable braggart, whose mythical home runs are rivaled only by his legendary ego. From his staggering ability and fabled pedigree (father Bobby played outfield for the Giants; cousin Reggie Jackson and godfather Willie Mays are both Hall of Famers) to his well-documented run-ins with teammates and the persistent allegations of steroid use, Bonds inspires a like amount of passion from both sides of the fence. For many, Bonds belongs beside Babe Ruth and Hank Aaron in baseball's holy trinity; for others, he embodies all that is wrong with the modern athlete: aloof; arrogant; alienated.

In Love Me, Hate Me, author Jeff Pearlman offers a searing and insightful look into one of the most divisive athletes of our time. Drawing on more than five hundred interviews -- with former and current teammates, opponents, managers, trainers, friends, and outspoken critics and unapologetic supporters alike -- Pearlman reveals, for the first time, a wonderfully nuanced portrait of a prodigiously talented and immensely flawed American icon whose controversial run at baseball immortality forever changed the way we look at our sports heroes.
--This text refers to the Paperback edition.

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Juicing the Game: Drugs, Power, and the Fight for the Soul of Major League Baseball Review

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Juicing the Game: Drugs, Power, and the Fight for the Soul of Major League Baseball ReviewThis year's revelations about rampant steroid use in Major League Baseball has escalated to the point that virtually every professional who played during the past decade automatically comes under suspicion (especially the power sluggers). As a longtime baseball fan, I've found this perpetual witch hunt irritating and have rapidly grown tired of the media obsession and with the subsequent inevitable and often irrational rants by politicians and sports fans. Even more galling is MLB Commissioner Bud Selig posing before Congress about his "strong" efforts to clean up the game, and his hypocritical tough posturing proposed through the media after the hearings. These are tough times for hardcore fans, and many of us would like to bury our heads in the sand and just enjoy the current pennant races.
But that has become impossible. Jose Canseco's "tell all" book, the February Congressional hearings, and media coverage have all put baseball's steroid scandal on the front page of the nation's sports section.
Steroids headlines another landmark moment in baseball history-akin to the gambling scandals (personified by the 1919 Chicago Black Sox) as well as the demarcation of an era when power hitting proliferated beyond reason (radically opposite the "dead ball era" of the early 20th century and the "pitchers' era" of the 1960's). But to follow the complicated story through ESPN and print journals only leads to confusion and misperceptions. Thus, Boston Herald sports columnist Howard Bryant comes to the rescue with his remarkably perceptive Juicing the Game that provides the necessary background and historical perspective to understand the issue-making this the most timely baseball book of 2005.
Bryant primarily frames his narrative around the decade that follows Major League Baseball's unfortunate 1994 strike that canceled the World Series that season, but to create an accurate picture requires a great deal of background. Bryant paints this in concisely (covering MLB's recent commissioners, influential owners and executives, major figures in the player's union and umpire's union, and the issues of that strike) before moving on to what Selig referred to as "Baseball's Renaissance" but will more certainly go down as "Baseball's Steroids Era."
Recently most of the fan talk has centered around Barry Bonds, Rafael Palmeiro, Jason Giambi, and other power sluggers who have admitted steroids use whether inadvertently or intentionally. Bryant delineates pertinent details on these players and others to give a much clearer visual picture of the issue, but he also astutely selects earlier indications of baseball's changing climate. Just how does a relatively light hitting Brady Anderson all of a sudden slug 50 homers in 1996? While MLB tried to pass this off as evidence of a livelier ball, smaller ballparks, improved nutrition, and weight training, the clarion call had been sounded all around MLB and its minor leagues.
Using his journalistic skills and wide-ranging contacts, Bryant offers irrefutable statistics and anecdotal evidence that clearly demonstrates just how such a huge change and development could lie "hidden" by baseball officials for so long. Few escape blame, for a wide ranging array of people benefited from baseball's sudden surge in home run power, and the boundaries go far beyond baseball-from Congressional laws concerning supplements, to baseball's beat writers who looked the other way to retain their team access, to society's faddish interest in health and weight training. Some teams (like the Arizona Diamondbacks, Oakland A's, and St. Louis Cardinals) even supplied free creatine to their players.
Despite the wide ranging forces that all converged to allow baseball to fall into complicity with steroid use, Bryant levels the most pointed criticism at the MLB Commissioner: "Bud Selig is out of control. His renaissance is in a shambles. He is flailing, grasping, angry. He is lost, swallowed whole by a phenomenon he never took the time to understand until after the fatal damage had been inflicted. If the notion of a tainted era and its full implications had not penetrated him fully before despite his jousts with McCain and the BALCO debacle, the devastation following the Canseco book shatters his calm . . . For nearly ten years, Bud Selig had referred to the decade as a renaissance, and now he is telling the public not to look back at the past. The thing to do is move forward, he says. The talk of a cover-up during his administration grows louder."
A thoroughly compelling read, Bryant has penned the definitive text about steroid use in our national pastime. Certainly the San Francisco Chronicle deserves accolades for breaking the BALCO story with its deep sources, but Bryant's work is also Pulitzer Prize worthy for taking an extremely complex issue and providing the historical and societal context to put this into proper perspective-an amazing accomplishment for a story that continues to unfold. Readers will find that they won't have to enhance their brain cells with ginkgo biloba to decipher Juicing the Game: Drugs Power, and the Fight for the Soul of Major League Baseball. All that is necessary is an interest in the game, its history, and its integrity.Juicing the Game: Drugs, Power, and the Fight for the Soul of Major League Baseball Overview

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Game of Shadows: Barry Bonds, BALCO, and the Steroids Scandal that Rocked Professional Sports Review

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Game of Shadows: Barry Bonds, BALCO, and the Steroids Scandal that Rocked Professional Sports ReviewIt's hard not to feel a profound sense of disappointment after reading this comprehensive, well-written investigative report on the abuse of steroids by athletes blinded by their need to be victorious in their various fields. While Barry Bonds is the primary subject here, San Francisco Chronicle reporters Lance Williams and Mark Fainaru-Wada are not as interested in sabotaging the star player's legacy-in-the-making as they are in exposing the breadth of impact that Victor Conte, founder of BALCO (an acronym for the Bay Area Laboratory Co-Operative), had in plying a number of star athletes with performance-enhancing drugs.
The reporters have done a remarkable job documenting the history of steroids, which were used as far back as the 1976 Summer Olympics where the East German women all too handily dominated the swimming events. One revelation for me from the book is how steroids do not directly enhance athletic performance but allow a greater endurance to train harder with a decreasing chance of injury and no need for recovery time. This nuance is critical in understanding how athletes can justify using such risky substances and escape accountability for their actions. This is the moral twist of the book and the one that resonates most clearly as a cautionary tale for future athletes in assessing their options.
Just as intriguing is the detailed chronicle of the rise and fall of the enterprising Conte, who went from being a bass guitarist for Tower of Power to the owner of a holistic health clinic to a highly paid consultant for renowned Olympic and professional athletes. Conte's real fortunes began with his discovery of a means to provide performance-enhancing drugs which would elude detection. At first, he saw the availability of obviously illegal steroids to targeted athletes as an opportunity to get them to endorse his legal nutritional supplements. Demand, however, went beyond his expectations, and he refocused his energy to identify creative ways to get the drugs into athletes, whether by injections, ointments or drips under the tongue.
At the center of the BALCO distribution scandal has been Bonds, who is certainly held up as the highest profile athlete under Conte's spell. The co-authors paint an alternately sympathetic and unflattering portrait of a prodigiously gifted athlete cast under the shadow of his father Bobby. The portrayal doesn't come across so much as exploitative as it does a typical case study into the competitive mindset of a professional athlete. Triggered by Mark McGwire's record-breaking 70 home runs during the 1998 season, Bonds was apparently determined to surpass McGwire by turning to steroids to bulk up his physique in the same way. His constant connection was personal trainer Greg Anderson, and through the next five seasons, Bonds' usage escalated and became more clandestine.
The result has been a stellar performance on the field with a hulking physique to match his superman-like transformation. Off the field, he evolved into a raging egomaniac not above cheating on his taxes or his wife. These are hostile allegations but ones that Williams and Fainaru-Wada support with reams of testimony by intimates and colleagues. In 2001, Bonds beat McGwire's single-season home run record, and he is on his way to beating Hank Aaron's career home run record this coming season. At the same time, Conte and Anderson, thanks to expert plea bargaining, saw minimal prison time for their actions. Whether Bonds is being held up as a scapegoat seems rather moot, as I cannot help but feel this will be an empty victory given the ample evidence the co-authors provide here. With Bonds' evasive responses in the press and the inevitable slander lawsuits, one gets little sense that there will by any abatement on the problem at hand.Game of Shadows: Barry Bonds, BALCO, and the Steroids Scandal that Rocked Professional Sports OverviewThe complete inside story of the shocking steroids scandal that turned the sports world upside down For years, in the shadowy reaches of the world of sport, there were rumors that some of our nation's greatest athletes were using steroids, human growth hormone, and other drugs to run faster, jump higher, and hit harder. But as track stars like Marion Jones blazed their way to Olympic medals and sluggers such as Mark McGwire brought fans back to baseball with stratospheric home runs, sports officials, the media, and fans looked past the rumors and cheered on the stars to ever-higher levels of performance. Then, in December 2004, after more than fifteen months of relentless reporting, San Francisco Chronicle reporters Mark Fainaru-Wada and Lance Williams broke the story of the Bay Area Lab Co-operative, a tiny nutritional supplement company that according to sworn testimony was supplying elite athletes, including baseball MVP Jason Giambi, with banned drugs. The stories, exposing rampant cheating at the highest levels of athletics, shocked the nation as sports heroes were brought low and their records were tainted. The exposes led to Congressional hearings on baseball's drug problems, and a revived effort to purge the U.S. Olympic movement of drug cheats. Now, in Game of Shadows, Fainaru-Wada and Williams tell the complete story of BALCO and the investigation that has shaken the foundations of the sporting world. They reveal how an obscure, self-proclaimed nutritionist, Victor Conte, became a steroid svengali to multi-millionaire athletes desperate for a competitive edge, and how he created superstars with his potent cocktails of miracle drugs. They expose the international web of coaches and trainers who funneled athletes to BALCO, and how the drug cheats stayed a step ahead of the testing agencies and the law. They detail how an aggressive IRS investigator doggedly gathered evidence until Conte and his co-conspirators were brought to justice. And at the center of the story is the biggest star of them all, Barry Bonds, the muscle-bound MVP outfielder of the San Francisco Giants whose suspicious late-career renaissance has him threatening Hank Aaron's all-time home run record. Shocking, revelatory, and page-turning, Game of Shadows casts light into the shadows of American sport to reveal the dark truths at the heart of the game today.

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