[beefree]

Wallace Matthews

Hank Aaron's absence says it all
July 9, 2007, 11:12 PM EDT

Tuesday night, Barry Bonds will be at the All-Star Game and Hank Aaron will not.

That sentence sums up everything that is wrong with Major League Baseball and its insincere and ineffectual commissioner, Bud Selig.





In the final days of Aaron's reign as baseball's home run king, there is nothing the game can do to assuage his anger or heal his wounds. All it can do is glorify his successor and hope the old man goes away quietly.

This is what it has come down to for Selig and his co-conspirators in their decade-long campaign to save their game at the cost of killing off one of its most inspiring heroes.

Baseball has lost Aaron, no matter how disingenuously both he and Selig try to maintain the fiction of a "friendship," no matter how carefully Aaron tries to couch his reasons for shunning anything to do with Bonds and the number 756, which soon will be linked in infamy.

Aaron's total, 755, was one of the great iconic numbers in the history of sports, as was its predecessor, 714. But 756 is a dirty number, a code number for cheating and corruption and collusion, this time among owners, players, agents and the commissioner, all of whom decided that how you played the game was less important than how much money you could wring out of it.

That is why Aaron will be nowhere near AT&T Park Tuesday night, and while it is easy for baseball to put on its best face during its replacement show -- a tribute to Willie Mays, former Giants great and, coincidentally, Bonds' godfather -- there is no getting around the reality that something shameful has happened here.

As Bonds nears the all-time home run total, baseball should be doing what it could not do with Babe Ruth, who died more than a quarter-century before Aaron finally caught him.

It should be paying tribute to its old home run king, the real home run king, the one who accumulated all those dingers with the equipment nature provided him, all 180 pounds of it.

In a perfect world, Aaron would be throwing out the ceremonial first pitch Tuesday night, then shaking the hand of the man who soon will succeed him, because passing the torch is a natural and inevitable process.

But there is nothing clean about this torch-passing, nothing natural about the way Bonds achieved his total, nothing heartwarming about this story at all.

Instead, it is a tragic tale, a story of a man betrayed by the game to which he gave 23 summers.

Aaron did not return phone calls Monday; you could not expect him to. After all, what else could he say? The man's absence from anything to do with Bonds says it all.

And you can't blame Aaron for being bitter about the way his record is being erased from the books and enraged by not only the inaction of the commissioner but his continued support of the cheaters who still infest baseball.

Selig&Co. contend they treasure Aaron and his body of work, but their actions say just the opposite. The Home Run Derby, the centerpiece of Selig's All-Star Extravaganza, is nothing more than a celebration of steroids, human growth hormone and other performance-enhancers, the game in microcosm from 1994 -- the year baseball's greed killed the World Series -- to today.

And the last-minute smuggling of Bonds into the All-Star Game through baseball's back door, via a mysterious late surge of essentially untraceable votes, tells you that baseball is more than ready to welcome the new king, even if it means trampling the body of the old.

Baseball and Selig should be ashamed of themselves for allowing this to happen. They should be embarrassed that they ever allowed themselves to be represented by the likes of Bonds, Mark McGwire, Rafael Palmeiro, Jason Giambi and who knows how many others.

They should hope to never again hear the numbers 73, 70 or 756. They should be mortified that they allowed Hank Aaron, one of their few true role models, to be alienated and pushed aside because of their embrace of a generation of cheaters and boors.

But of course, they are none of those things. Tuesday night, they shamelessly present the first annual Barry Bonds All-Star Game, and Hank Aaron is nowhere to be found.

There is something very wrong with that picture.

[AUTIGER]

This says it all I don't even hate Bonds because he did Steroids I hate him because he is the biggest asshole in the game. Even at Arizona State the guy was a prick.