...person to write about Barry Bonds today.

Sike. Just kidding. Or not.

I mean I could write about Barry Bonds. I could take the pro-Barry side and write an entry about how all the great men in history have taken liberties with the rules in pursuit of their own brilliance. I could take the anti-Barry side and give him a literary tarring and feathering. I could even sit the fence and juxtapose Barry's natural gifts with his alleged unseemly nature. None of it would matter, though.

(Have I said this before? I feel like I have. Anyway...)

Barry Bonds hit another home run today. Put an asterisk on it. Put a truckload of asterisks on it. That doesn't mean it didn't happen.

Does that home run mean what you want it to mean? What I want it to mean? What Barry wants it to mean? Who knows?

Value is, and always will be, a construct. Babe Ruth can be completely erased from the record books and he'll still have the same value. He is as much a man as he is a myth. Fortunately for him - and perhaps for the 12-year-old-boy inside of every baseball fan - myths mean a little more than mere men.

Babe Ruth hit 714 home runs. That happened. And that had value.

Barry Bonds has hit his 714th home run. That happened. It has value, too.

Is one equal to the other? I can't tell you that. You'll have to construct it for yourself.

Just don't let another 715 writers try to get inside your head and make up your mind for you.

Ordinarily, I avoid doing whatever it is that everyone else is doing.

Not in this post, though.

Everything that could possibly be said about Barry Bonds has been said. Ten times over. Last year.

Or has it?

See...I really don't care how many home runs Barry Bonds hits. Or has hit.

I don't care if he took steroids. Or any other skull-growing "supplements".

I'll watch him play. I may even marvel at one of his Saturn-shots.

Ultimately, though, I'm not that concerned with Barry Bonds, the baseball player.

Baseball simply is not a sacred thing to me.

Nor should it be for you.

For real.

If all the sportswriters and fans and other opinion-havers of the world were not so hell-bent on holding baseball up as something holy and sacred, then we probably wouldn't be faced with such a nasty-tasting endeavor into history.

Yes, I know that baseball is America's past-time.

Yes, I know that fathers and sons have bonded for generations on diamonds and in backyards.

Yes, I know that the vestiges of childhood are often the most difficult trappings to rid oneself of.

But, dude, it's just a game.

It's played by grown men who make boatloads of money. It's run by other grown men who hold cities hostage for the right to host them. And it's a past-time whose time of innocence passed long ago.

The Black Sox. Segregation. Free Agency. The DH. Juiced Balls.

The game has been tainted - one way or another - for almost as long as it's been played.

And fans have always complained about those things. Yet they still hold the game up as sacred, if not pure.

Barry Bonds is gonna break Babe Ruth's home run record. It won't make Babe Ruth mean any less to baseball. And it probably won't make baseball mean any less to you.

It'll always be sacred to you. Because you want it to be sacred.

And you'll continue to moan about it. Because it isn't.