Bonds, bombs, roids and the rage of 14 years

So, Barry Bonds was a rampant steroid user ... stop the presses!

It's been 14 years since he made that half-assed throw from the middle of left field that was offline and needed one hop to get to the plate and failed to beat Sid Bream, the slowest man in baseball history. Maybe if Bonds had been using steroids back then, the throw would have a little more oomph on it and the Pirates would have made it to the World Series. We'll never know. I still thought Bream was out anyway.

But I'm not bitter about it or anything.

Not much.

The poor, miserable star-crossed Pittsburgh Pirates. Seems like every guy who leaves Pittsburgh goes on to bigger and better things elsewhere. Bonds is the ultimate example of that trend. He has 710 home runs as of this writing, the most recent of which came last night. I realized today, perhaps for the first time, that he's going to surpass Hank Aaron. He needs 45 more. It may take him until next season, and I think he'll come back next year if he's anywhere close, his weeping "nobody understands me and my pain" schtick on his preposterous ESPN show notwithstanding.

The furor over the Bonds steroid allegations has died down somewhat since Game of Shadows was released. There will be more. He's going to have to answer to the IRS and it looks like he'll be facing some perjury charges. But it feels like the damage is done. When he passes Aaron, I'm not sure anyone is going to know how to celebrate the occasion. It will be anticlimactic, awkward. But he brought that on himself.

Meanwhile, the Pirates have been lost since that night in Atlanta in October 1992. They are miserable yet again. They lost today by a run. Seven losses in a row. They've scored 12 runs in those seven games. Been shut out twice. It's not even May and the season is already over.

Only another three months until the Steelers start training camp!

Snow Job

OK, so it's been a while since I've had anything to say here. I've had better times. But today, Tony Snow was named the new White House press flak. And this is the kind of thing people who aren't in the media find alarming. One minute, he supposed to be a news commentator and now he's the White House's mouthpiece. So much for any witless fantasy that he might have displayed any objectivity. Is it any wonder so many people don't trust the media?

Now, to be sure, nobody ever was confused about Snow's politics. He's a commentator, not a reporter, and he's a Fox News Channel guy -- or should we call it Fox Republican Propaganda Channel? I was disgusted by a story that circulated not long ago about how Dick Cheney requests the TV's in his hotel rooms to be tuned to Fox News Channel when he gets there, as if he'd shrivel up and melt like the Wicked Witch of the West if he had to be exposed to a less-partial perspective. I won't make the mistake of thinking there's no bias on channels like CNN and MSNBC. There's just a lot less of it there than there is on Fox.

I've always thought it an impossibly irreconcilable paradox that Fox spews all of this conservative bile on its news broadcasts, but its entertainment offerings are often liberal (The Simpsons) or push the edges of the envelope (Family Guy) or are just outright trashy (Cops, The OC, 90210, Melrose Place, Temptation Island, Married With Children, I Want To Marry a Millionaire ... hell, every show they've ever aired!).

So anyway, I guess we get to spend the next couple years listening to smug Uncle Tony tell us how we're winning in Iraq and how the economy is great how the President really does care about high gas prices.

Good thing many of us already are in the habit of not believing anything he says.