Maybe It’s Best if Bonds Marriage With Giants Runs Its Course

By WILLIAM C. RHODEN
Sports of The Times
July 7, 2007

San Francisco

With five more home runs, Barry Lamar Bonds will become baseball’s new home run king. In a perfect world, Bonds would then retire gracefully — as a San Francisco Giant — at the conclusion of this season. It would be the end of an era, and perhaps the diminishing of a controversy that has become something of a civil war.

“That would be the ideal situation,” said Peter Magowan, the Giants’ managing general partner, during an interview Thursday. “But he seems determined to go on and play, and I have no idea where.”

Magowan was dropping an unambiguous hint that if Bonds were to play next season, it would not be in a Giants uniform, although Magowan said he expected to see him hitting home runs for someone. “I’m sure there’s going to be interest in him,” he said.

The Giants are preparing to serve as hosts of the All-Star Game next week, but it is life after Bonds that seems to be foremost on the team’s mind. Once just a hazy concept, the post-Bonds era in San Francisco is now a virtual reality, the only question being how soon it will come.

Maybe it can’t begin soon enough. The Giants are in last place in the National League West, hopelessly out of contention and headed for a third consecutive losing campaign. After the All-Star Game on Tuesday and after Bonds hits that record-setting home run — whenever that occurs — the Giants will be left to grind out the rest of the season in futility.

For Magowan, the All-Star Game plum is only mild consolation for an otherwise dreary season. “I do feel good about the All-Star Game; we’re excited,” he said. “But some of the excitement has been taken away from me by the performance of our team this year. I want to see the Giants win a World Series.”

For that to happen, the Giants need to take some bold action. If there is interest in Bonds, as Magowan suggests, why wait until the season ends, when Bonds will leave anyway? If Bonds breaks the home run record before the July 31 trade deadline, then the Giants should try to trade him and jump-start their reconstruction era.

That’s cold-blooded, but baseball is a cold-blooded business. Besides, Bonds will apparently be back with the Giants at some point. He has a 10-year personal-services contract with the team that starts when he retires.

In 1972, the Giants traded a fading Willie Mays to the Mets, letting him finish his career in the city where he began it. So why not trade Bonds?

“That’s certainly something that’s never been discussed,” said Larry Baer, executive vice president and chief operating officer for the Giants, when asked about the idea.

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On the contrary, I think it has been thought about within the Giants’ organization, if not seriously discussed. If one of the other 29 major league teams offers a package for Bonds that can begin to reverse the Giants’ skid, the team should pull the trigger and say goodbye.

The Bonds-Giants marriage began before the 1993 season, with swashbuckling passion and tons of money. The Magowan group scooped up Bonds and signed him even before their purchase of the team had been officially approved.

The first decade of marriage happily moved toward a championship. In 2001, Bonds had one of the great statistical seasons in baseball history. He hit a record 73 home runs, batted .328, drove in 137 runs and walked 177 times. In 2002, the Giants won the National League pennant and nearly won the World Series, with Bonds leading the way. In 2003, they won 100 games in the regular season to capture their division.

But since then, the marriage has gradually been overwhelmed by persistent, if unproven, allegations that Bonds used steroids to transform himself. The steroid cloud has taken much of the joy out of what should be a great national celebration as Bonds closes in on Hank Aaron’s record of 755 career home runs. In many ways, the controversy has isolated the Giants and their fans, who are seemingly the only ones in the country who still cheer for Bonds, their left-handed slugger.

The more intriguing question is where Bonds might land if he were traded this season. The difficulty is not Bonds’s contract — just one year, $15.8 million — and certainly not his ability, which is still formidable for someone who turns 43 this month. The difficulty is that cloud of suspicion.

But what if that cloud were lifted? What happens if the federal prosecutors, who have had Bonds in their sights for several seasons in connection with the Bay Area Laboratory Co-operative steroid-distribution case, decide to drop their investigation sometime this month, when the current grand jury may expire?

Is there a market for a left-handed home run king? “As far as I know,” Magowan said, “no one’s called us up and said, We’d like to take Barry Bonds off your hands.”

Bonds would fit in the middle of the lineup in San Diego or Los Angeles, two teams fighting for the division lead in the N.L. West. I can’t imagine Bonds in San Diego, where fans once greeted him by throwing a syringe on the field. And if you’re a Dodgers fan, caught up in the rivalry with the Giants, you cannot imagine Bonds at all.

For my tastes, any Bonds trade speculation brings us, as always, to the Yankees. Give us your poor, your tired, your huddled masses longing to be free.

The Yankees were suitors for Bonds 15 years ago. He turned them down. Now the Yankees somehow find themselves under .500, in peril of missing the postseason for the first time in Joe Torre’s dozen seasons as manager. Bonds could help the Yankees, as a more dangerous designated hitter than they currently have. But would they really take him, then deal with the news-media onslaught that would follow?

In the end, what the Giants have in Bonds may be a player that everyone grudgingly admires from afar but will not dare touch. The marriage that began in 1993 will probably have to run its course. “Till death do us part” would seem to apply.

E-mail: wcr@nytimes.com