Bonds Is a Shadow of Old Self

Defiance carried Barry Bonds for three more hours on Easter, above the field-level boos and press-box scrutiny, above Major League Baseball and government examination, above the wrecked knee and elbow, above however he feels about whatever he did to his body and the game.

Two weeks, two new books and two new investigations into the baseball season, his shoulders are pulled back, his chin is out, his expression is unchanged, all as his batting average dropped to a buck-seventy-four.

Bonds being Bonds, getting through it, leaning into the breeze of road-game opinion, 75 unsteady steps from the rail of the dugout to the middle of left field.

Yeah, more of the same.

Same chants. Same boos in the on-deck circle. Same cheers for another oh-fer, all for TV. ESPN original entertainment, Bombs on Bonds.

Early Sunday afternoon, Bonds raised up from his locker, trudged heavily to the manager’s office door and then through it. He’d played every day since Thursday, limping through some of it, rolling grounders to first base, popping fly balls to the warning track.

“He came in to get a bottle of water,” San Francisco Giant Manager Felipe Alou said, smiling. “I thought it was to tell me he wasn’t feeling too good.”

Bonds had come out laughing, Alou having revealed the same thing to his left fielder and cleanup hitter.

The road has been hard on Bonds, in San Diego and Los Angeles. But it has been nothing he couldn’t handle, unless he’s counting batting average, home runs (0) and runs batted in (1), unless he’d figured to have overtaken Babe Ruth by now, or at least cut into the six home runs standing between them.

Asked if the crowd reaction was predictably hostile, Alou said, “If you call yelling and all that ‘hostility,’ then yes.”

He grinned at the traveling show that is Bonds, the strangers on the Giant payroll who serve Bonds, and the reporters and fans who come to see him, and to pick at him.

“The day the clubhouse isn’t crowded and we don’t hear yelling,” Alou said, “we’ll be disappointed. We’re all used to it now. We’ll all miss it. It’s part of the atmosphere. Ambience. I’ll miss that.”

Sure, and the starting pitcher who walked through the clubhouse Friday afternoon and groused, “Aw, man, give me some space,” absolutely adores it.

Bonds has an arthritic right knee, bone chips in his left elbow, and they’re both swollen nearly to the point of rigidity, despite his anti-inflammatory diet. His day ended Sunday with a fastball to the right triceps from Dodger reliever Tim Hamulack. Plate umpire Lance Barksdale, perhaps for the moment convinced he worked for MLB security chief Kevin Hallinan, ejected Hamulack on the spot. Giant starter Brad Hennessey threw a baseball off Jeff Kent’s helmet a half-inning before. But nobody touches Bonds without somebody overreacting.

The crowd cheered Hamulack, who declined to doff his cap. It booed Bonds, presumably unhurt because of the plastic armor covering the arm that faces the pitcher. Bonds left the clubhouse without speaking, sending back word he’d gone to greet his family.

He had one hit -- an opposite-field double against a swung-around defense -- in 12 plate appearances in the series. Maybe, by the time the Giants return to Dodger Stadium in early July, Bonds will be Bonds again, in body and slugging percentage. Maybe he’ll have been to the disabled list and back, to Ruth and back, headed toward Aaron. Maybe he’ll be retired.

Meantime, the Dodgers found a hitter who could be pitched to.

Fastballs away worked. So did breaking balls away. Jae Seo threw a fastball down the middle in the second inning Sunday that Bonds fouled straight back. Flat missed it. Seo threw an inside slider in the fourth inning Bonds took for a strike. For the moment, he’s just a guy with a bat.

One Dodger pitcher said he’d laughed at friends who asked what it was like to get Bonds out.

“I told them that wasn’t Bonds I got out,” he said. “That wasn’t Bonds.”

His front leg was once the hard side that helped generate torque for the fly balls that seemed to never land. Now it lands and bows, bends, crumples. He never gets off his back side. He’s a different hitter.

He’ll get his arm-swing home runs, for sure. But, for now, it appears he’ll have to pull them to reach the fence. Another home run candidate fell on the warning track in center field Sunday, with the wind blowing to right center, Bonds’ wife and daughter pushing from behind the visitors’ dugout, the Giants begging for runs.

You wonder if Bonds worries if any of his buddies, his former buddies, might roll over. You wonder if he worries he talked too much to team trainers, to teammates, to workout partners, to ex-girlfriends. You wonder how much of a drag it all is.

But, not Alou.

“I’m just going to write his name in the lineup and he’s going to do his Barry thing,” he said.

And then they’ll all show up the next day and do it again.