With that said, Kevin Kaduk over at Big League Stew has not only been gracious enough to link to WFNY on more than several occasions, he also allowed yours truly to present an argument to bring Barry Bonds to Cleveland as a part of his ongoing “Barry Bonds Job Watch.”
While I’m not necessarily sold on the addition of Bonds – really the only major league baseball player that I honestly can’t stand to even watch – I thought that Cleveland’s current situation (with a mixture of the past) could lend a decent argument for those that want to improve at any and all costs. With that said, please head over to BLS today to check out Why the Cleveland Indians Should Sign Barry Bonds.
As expected, the comments are mixed between, “Heck yea, let’s bring him aboard!” and “How can Yahoo! let such incompetence write for their site, I’m canceling my accounts!!!” Feel free to leave your opinions on their board, or head back here for less riff-raff. Thanks, all.
Author: Scott
Scott is a co-founder/editor of Waiting For Next Year who resides in Cleveland, Ohio. Feel free to follow him on Twitter or email him at scott@waitingfornextyear.com.Scott has written 1701 articles for Waiting for Next Year.
Excellent work, Sarge …. And the Yahoo! comments go with the territory. I forget who said it, but reading the Y! comments is a bit like standing in line at Six Flags.
Only you don’t have to leave your house.
Nice job Sarge. Well written. If Bonds comes here I’ll never write about the Indians. They would be dead to me until Bonds and his head left Cleveland.
28 HRs, 66 RBI, .480 OBP, 1.045 OPS….Can the Indians get that production out of anyone in their system at LF? If they think the answer is ‘no’, they should at least pick up the phone and see how much money Barry wants, and then weight the cost effectiveness of it.
Personally, I would be intruiged to see what he could add to the Indians roster. The price would have to be right, but he could add some much needed production to the Indians’ lineup.
But I should add, there’s 0% of it ever happening. No way will the Indians even consider it.
Thanks, guys. Another interesting tidbit is Bonds has recently said that he hasn’t received one offer yet – even for league minimum.
Haha, well, then, the Indians should offer league minimum to him so he can’t say that. I mean, nobody would turn down having Bonds on this team for league minimum, would they??
I would…..he ruins the character of the entire team and kills the team image.
How does he ruin the character of the team? What, exactly, is he going to do that is going to “ruin” anything about Grady, Victor, Garko, etc?
I mean, JT Snow survived playing with Bonds just fine. Omar Vizquel. Rich Aurilia. There’s been many high character guys who have played with Bonds and survived just fine.
Don’t you think there is a reason nobody has offered him a contract? Don’t you think there is a reason that the Giants didn’t decided to let Barry say when he is finished in SF? It can’t just be about the steroid issue either. Tejada got a job. Giambi still has a job, all the other players from the Mitchell report still have a job. Pettite is still a Yankee. Why wouldn’t Texas offer him 2 million a season? Why not the Angels?
It’s because the guy is widely known as a complete and total selfish, me first, me second and third and I’ll squeeze the team in somewhere around 8th kind of player.
i just threw up a bit in my face
Between asking for $20 million to play, the impending perjury charges against him, his gimpy knee, and his age….I would say those are all bigger factors in him not having a job than his perceived “selfishness”. There have been plenty of Giants teammates who have had no problem with Barry at all. I named some of them above.
I guess I don’t understand what being selfish has to do with anything in baseball. It’s not like basketball where you can hog the ball and take all the shots yourself.
I want the Indians main story line to be about the Indians…nit the selfish jerk in LF. I think he would taint the entire perception of the team (to the public)
I want the Indians main story to be them winning a World Series. And if a jerk playing LF would help that cause, I’m all for it (again….for a price. I’m only talking league minimum here. I wouldn’t pay Bonds much at all to play for the Indians, for the reasons I listed previously).
But Rock, if they won a WS, we’d need a new URL…
http://www.iwishitwaslastyear.com?
No, then we would shift focus to the Browns and Cavs! If they all won in the same year, I might just retire from blogging…
So in suggesting this… would we get Barry before prison or after? Or maybe we could get him before and work it into the contract to where we didn’t have to pay him for the during. He could stay fresh by taking pitches from Ricky Vaughn and then be ready to hit the ground running when he comes comes back and we could resume regular pay again. If baseball works anything like football, he could serve his time during the offseason and really not miss a beat.
I came here for less riff raff, not more of it. How does the public’s image of the team affect how the team plays?
Great article, Scott.
It doesn’t affect the way a team plays, but the cancer in the locker room could affect it.
I’d love to see a statistical study done on the affect of “selfishness” on a team’s performance. I’m guessing the affect would be smaller than most people think. I guess I’m just saying, I promise you Bonds’ skill won the Giants WAY more games than his “selfishness” lost for them.
I took a leadership class once where we studied how Vince Lombardi handled his most negative players in training camp…. these were the days when an NFL team would go to a college campus and room players together during camp. In Lomardi’s formative years with the Redskins he would room is most selfish, problematic players with his team’s best leaders, in hopes that the positive influences would rub off, raising the bar of expectation so negativity would be eliminated on the field. It didn’t work. As Lombardi moved to Green Bay, he tried the same formula and saw it not work there as well. So,he took a risk and strategically roomed every negative selfish guy with each other, separating them altogether from the team players and team leaders off the field in housing. He discovered, over time, that the negativity and selfish play on the field was something that was no longer tolerated by the team as a whole as the diminishing off the field negavity visibly poured over to the expectation of practice and play. Selfishness, as well as good character, affect others.
That’s a good story, but it’s WAAAAAY more relevant to football, or even basketball than to baseball.
I still don’t want to see Barry here.