The tragedy of Bonds is he didn't need the cream or the clear. He was no Jason Giambi -- a perfectly nice doubles hitter with a good eye before he swole himself up into a slugger -- but an organic, all-natural Hall of Famer. Pending further evidence, I don't believe Bonds was on the juice in the early 1990s, when he was putting up awesome years. But whatever drove him to be able to do that on the ballfield also drove him, if his mistress's allegations are true, to the syringe. (Or the cream, or the clear, or whatever.) The Hall of Fame that eluded his father wasn't enough; he had to propel himself into the stratosphere with Mays and Ruth and Aaron. You can see an echo of this in the allegations of Bonds laundering $80,000 in autograph money. Why on earth? What's $80,000 to Bonds? (Or to Martha Stewart, for that matter.) Maybe it's simply that the kind of drive that makes you a Hall of Famer (or a self-made mogul) can't be modulated or switched on and off -- being that good means you go for the kill every time, even when it isn't in your interests.

I booed Bonds when he'd come to the plate at Shea, but that was because A) he was trying to beat us; and B) I couldn't abide the spectacle-seeking know-nothings who were cheering for him in our park, hoping for another event to add to the string of them adorning their pointless, frivolous lives. More than anything else, I was booing them. As far as I can recall, I've never disliked Bonds. Heck, I was always conscious of seeing one more game about which I could one day tell Joshua's children, "Sure, I saw Barry Bonds play."

To my amazement, I've let myself get sucked back into fantasy baseball after 14 years on the wagon -- a friend of mine invited me to play in a league full of diehard baseball fans who sounded like entertaining company, and I couldn't resist.

This is not exactly the fantasy baseball of the late 1980s, when as commissioner I used to spend hours of valuable New Orleans boozing time transcribing stats from USA Today by hand, then slip them into the newspaper's outgoing mail. In this new millennium, my draft preparations consisted of manipulating a Java applet displaying Yahoo! Fantasy Baseball's ranked list of every player in the majors, with the ability to look up stats, break down players by position, automatically set up draft queues, launch the space shuttle, and who knows what else. Amazing. Yes, I sound like an old man.

So my first move was to exclude hated Yankees, particularly hated former Yankees, and Met apostates from my roster of potential draftees. A-Rod, the top-ranked player in all of fantasy baseball, was the first one chucked on the forbidden list, quickly followed by his little friend Jeter. Adios, Posada and Rivera. Back in your Montoursville bunker, Mussina. Away with you, Bernie Williams -- and by the way, you suck at guitar. The Antichrist got tossed, of course. So did Kenny Lofton. Then it was time for former Mets -- no game today, Armando, Jeff Kent and Bruce Chen. Finally I threw Franco and Leiter on the pile out of spite. (True confession: I exiled Jae Seo in a fit of pique. Omar will soon do the same.)

This is, of course, a great way to lose. So be it -- I will lose with honor.

Did I draft Mets, you ask? Of course I did. I took Wright fairly early, grabbed Glavine in the middle rounds (while thinking to myself, "Gee, I don't even like Tom Glavine"), and added Floyd and Mientkiewicz to fill out the roster late. Other notable players on the '05 edition of the Jaison D'Etres: Jim Thome, Luis Castillo, Miguel Cabrera, Nick Swisher, B.J. Upton, Grady Sizemore, Rich Harden, John Lieber, Danny Haren, and Scott Kazmir. We'll see how this goes, and I promise few if any updates from the world of fake baseball.

Happily, I wound up with no Yankees. Though I admit I was thought Giambi might be a bargain and was lying in wait for him in the middle rounds. (He got away, which means I did too.)

Turk Wendell forgive me.

With XM Radio, you can listen to every home team broadcast of every game this year including a bunch from spring training. Wednesday night, with the Mets and Cards on the FAN from Jupiter, I checked XM and they were carrying the St. Louis broadcast about a minute delayed.

So first I heard Gary Cohen enthusiastically call a sweet play that David Wright made at third. While that was completed, Mike Shannon of KMOX was droning on about what a great crowd we're gonna get here at Roger Dean Stadium tonight. Then when the Wright play happened, he gave it its props, adding, "few are paying attention to David Wright but he's gonna be good".

What planet is Mike Shannon living on? Oh right, St. Louis.

I bought USA Today Sports Weekly last week because at least in the New York edition they put Wright (future Greatest Met 1 through 4) on the cover. In a spread featuring the "award winners of tomorrow," he was picked as the 2006 Silver Slugger. Great! Next to him was "Scott Kazmir: 2007 AL Cy Young Award winner". D'oh!

Not sure how apocryphal it was, but do you remember how in the wake of that awesome 11-9, 12-inning win over the Giants last August (decided on a fly ball lost in the sun) it was reported that Barry Bonds acknowledged Diamond Dave? He landed on third after a triple (having gotten on base six times, not homering and not being intentionally walked; it was seriously Howe's finest hour of managing) and after young David told him "you're as good as advertised," Bonds replied, "keep swinging it".

If David Wright can make Barry Bonds seem human, he can do anything. Except maybe cook for himself, according to Thursday's News.

Regarding that opposing player, as long as I've brought him up in a Mets context, Barry Bonds is so easy to root against. I sat deep in left field for the final game of the Mets-Giants division series in 2000, the Bobby Jones one-hitter. There was one guy (a rabid beer drinker on a very cold day) who could not stop taunting him. We were too far from the field for Barry to possibly hear us, but the guy wouldn't shut up. I cringed out of fear of awaking the sleeping Giant but after a while it was infectious. We were all chanting horrible things about Bonds (the guy who started it was off buying beer during his last at-bat and caught loads of grief for it).

Yet to be honest, except for when he's playing against us, I find it hard to root against Barry Bonds. On the field, he's the best player I've ever seen. There's nobody close. I love watching him hit. I love watching him take. When he could still move, I loved watching him play left field. In a human-being contest, I'd prefer Henry Aaron maintain the home-run record forever, but I was looking forward to Bonds chasing and passing him because I like watching history get made and I like great players getting the attention they deserve.

Count me among the enablers who turned a blind eye to substance-enhanced performance when it was blossoming in the late '90s. I just figured players worked out a lot more than they used to. I wouldn't consider myself a home-run whore, especially coming from a pitching-and-defense tradition (and intensely abhorring the front-runners who showed up at Shea in Cardinal or Cub jerseys). I never felt any particular affection for McGwire or Sosa. But I admired their accomplishments. My friend Chuck would tell you that I never notice anything physical about anybody but watching McGwire give a press conference in 1998, I heard myself say "will ya look at the guns on that guy?" He must really lift, I guessed. Bonds and Sheffield talked about their off-season workout regimen. Gosh, I figured, it must be working.

It's difficult to pretend that whatever we've seen over the past decade didn't occur. I know I watched guys hit 73 and 70 and 66 home runs in a season. I sat at a Mets game late in the '98 campaign when the DiamondVision announced McGwire had just hit his 64th of the season. My god, I thought, 64 home runs and we're alive to see it. He must take lots of swings in the cage below the stands or something.

If and when Bonds comes back, the baseball tastemakers in the media will tut-tut him until he hits his first home run. Seeing as how the Giants always manage to have him in San Francisco when he reaches a milestone, he'll hit No. 715 at Phone Company Park and he'll be cheered and it will be treated as an achievement. By the time he gets to 756, depending on whatever other revelations come to the fore, the line will be "sure, he did this or that and he's like this or that but boy, you've got to admire the accomplishment". And since it will also probably take place in San Francisco, the visuals will be Bonds-friendly, he'll be tearful and say wonderful things about his family and for a few minutes most people will forget about the steroids, et al.

Once he retires, he'll be remembered less than fondly and less all the time. Baseball is really good about its oral history. The 1919 Reds are still listed as world champions but everybody save for the smallest child knows the story. If Bonds hits 756+ home runs, he hit them. He swung, he connected, he trotted around the bases. Those who choose to pretend he didn't, that's their business. I know what I saw.

Well, I'm in midseason form -- somehow I thought the season started next week. Along with the time change. This extended winter is destroying my brain.

Quick question: When you hear "partially herniated disk," do you think, "Well, that's no big deal"? Me neither. Not with Trachsel on the shelf. Not with the ghost of Edgardo Alfonzo hovering over both of us. Some good news on Matsui would be most welcome.

On to the 30's.

I admit to branding Bobby Jones a cancer once he replaced Jose Vizcaino as my scapegoat for Everything That Was Wrong With the Mets. He was so ... average. Except for the famous Steve Avery/Jose V. game, in which he was ... Estesian. And, of course, for the clincher against the Giants, in which he was ... Koufaxian? Johnsonian? Fellerite? Whatever he was, no one's timing has ever been so good. You'd think a one-hitter to clinch a postseason series would make even the most jaded New York fan regret saying all those bad things, and I did regret them ... until about next June. For which I'm not as ashamed as I probably should be. I guess it's that in my eyes, most of the time he was neither Estesian or Koufaxian, but right exactly between them, embodying the quietly soul-killing mediocrity one sometimes fears is the natural state of existence. By the way, that thing with the other Bobby Jones on the roster at the same time was just ridiculous. Once per franchise was enough, thanks. (Memo to Pedro A. Martinez: Stay retired.)

On the other hand, I loved Todd Hundley for so much less. All that piss and vinegar, sometimes even channeled into the game of baseball. I loved that he was Randy's kid in the wrong uniform as far as Chicagoans were concerned. I loved that he was blunt to a fault, in the fine old Backman tradition, that he snuck cigarettes like Mex, that he stayed out too late like the whole '86 squad. It wasn't quite so cool that the other side of midnight ate up a lot of his potential, in the not-so-fine old Elster tradition, but that's a risk one runs liking that kind of player. And in this age of chemical suspicion, I don't like to revisit my astonishment that the twiglike Double-A catcher who announced himself with his shockingly unlikely double off Dibble in '90 soon transformed into a hulking backstop. Regardless, Hot Rod stayed Hot Rod -- I saw him in Candlestick near the end, looking bewildered and unhappy out in left field, but still egging on the frat boys in the bleachers by cupping his hand to his ear as they gave him the business. And when the Dodgers wound up going into the stands at Wrigley, I immediately looked for him, confident he'd been in the scrum throwing hands, as Lenny Harris liked to say. And indeed he was.

I was standing next to you for Rey Ordonez's famous debut, and what sticks with me is the sound. Remember that? It was this sort of rolling murmur that went on and on, rising and falling, of a sort that I'd never heard 50,000-odd people make. That's because 50,000-odd people don't generally turn to their neighbors and quietly ask, "Did he really just do that?" Later, we'd discover he couldn't hit at all, had a habit of collecting wives, was on a first-name basis but not a last-name basis with his trainers, and was too self-centered to even feign interest in his own highlight video. But that's mostly forgotten. The memory of that sound remains.

Every team needs a Lee Mazzilli. He was the capstone of the '86 team, the piece that made you happy in a way anyone with a heart would be happy, because when he came back it meant that it wasn't too late for Lee Mazzilli after all -- his faith had been rewarded, his struggles would get to mean something. "You gotta excuse me, I've been smiling for two months now," he told some reporter or other before the World Series, and so had we all. When he was shipped out again, this time to Toronto, I wasn't surprised he was done almost immediately. I liked to think he'd left everything he had with us.

About Armando Benitez, all I can say is this: One day in December 2001 I'd tracked in something or other and found myself vaccuuming an annoyingly large portion of our downstairs hall. No one else was home, and my various chores had led me into the kind of meditative state in which you aren't 100% aware of your own thoughts anymore. Except suddenly I realized I was fuming. Goddamn Armando, I realized I was subvocalizing repeatedly. Goddamn Armando. And I wasn't thinking about Brian Jordan; I was thinking about Paul O'Neill and his fatal at-bat, which had transpired 14 months ago. And had been thinking about it, in increasing agitation, for a good 20 or 30 minutes. Goddamn Armando.

When I was an intern in New Orleans, Ron Swoboda was a sportscaster for a local TV station. He'd occasionally come down to Molly's at the Market, the Decatur Street hangout for journalistas, and the woman I'd started dating knew him and spoke of him with amused familiarity. All of this terrified me, because I seemed to be the only one who understood that this was no local sportscaster -- this was Ron Swoboda. Ron Swoboda who made The Catch. The woman I'd started dating didn't know anything about The Catch, which shocked and appalled me at the time, and, come to think of it, still does. I never did meet Swoboda that summer, for which I'm grateful, because I would have made an idiot of myself even by the low standards of my usual behavior. I don't know when he left broadcasting, but now he's the only Met old-timer who looks cool on those fantasy-camp TV spots. He says his pitch and tilts his head at the camera a little bit and kind of smirks. If I'd made The Catch, I'd be on my 36th year of kind of smirking and looking cool, too.