Now That He Keeps Getting Left Out of the Hall of Fame, Barry Bonds is Super Sorry for How Much of a Jerk He Was

So here’s a take that should also function as a disclaimer: Barry Bonds is probably the greatest baseball player of all time and can be let into the Hall of Fame for all I care.

Two things work against Bonds: (1) According to a great number of reports, he took a great many performance-enhancing drugs for a great length of time, and (2) he was a tremendous jerk to everyone, particularly — and this is important — to the media people who are, all these years later, casting votes for and (mostly) against his Hall of Fame candidacy.

Bonds — again, greatest baseball player of all time — has been eligible for induction for four years, but has not come close to making it in. This was his best year yet, but he still only got 44 percent of the votes. You need 75 percent. Six more year of this, and he’ll be permanently ineligible.

So you know what this means: Barry Bonds is suddenly really sorry to all those reporters and teammates and general peons he treated like urinal cakes for all those years.

From Sports on Earth:

"“I’m to blame for the way I was [portrayed], because I was a dumba**. I was straight stupid, and I’ll be the first to admit it. I mean, I was just flat-out dumb. What can I say? I’m not going to try to justify the way I acted toward people. I was stupid. It wasn’t an image that I invented on purpose. It actually escalated into that, and then I maintained it. You know what I mean? It was never something that I really ever wanted. No one wants to be treated like that, because I was considered to be a terrible person. You’d have to be insane to want to be treated like that. That makes no sense."

True, it would be nice to treat other people terribly but not be considered terrible, if treating people terribly is something you’re into, as was the case with Bonds. A few people are able to pull that off, but Bonds wasn’t so gifted when it came to that.

Bonds also audaciously attempted to explain that treating other people unkindly was all part of a winning strategy.

"“The guys came up to me, and they said, ‘Barry try,’ you know what I mean?” Bonds said, referring to how those Giants teammates pleaded with him to change his public image. “And I did change. I was nice, and I was saying, ‘Hello’ to folks and I was very calm. But I was like 0-for-21. And the first thing those teammates said to me was, ‘We want the old Barry back.’ I said, ‘Yeah, but y’all don’t like the old Barry.’ And they said, ‘We don’t care. We want the old Barry back.’ But the media never knew that was happening, and I was still being cooperative with [reporters] during that stretch, and they were still writing crazy stuff about me, but in that new role, I didn’t care."

Whatever you say, Barry.

His being an a-hole should not, in theory, affect his Hall of Fame candidacy. But reporters, Bonds seems to just now be learning, are human too.