Thursday, February 18, 2010

Tha Artivist: Barry Was Robbed…



Tha Artivist: Barry Was Robbed…

Barry Bonds will go down as the greatest ballplayer ever. He will also go down as the man whose brilliant Hall Of Fame career was short circuited by the hypocritical MLB (Major League Baseball) establishment…He became the sacrificial lamb for major league baseball’s sins…His godfather and another all time great Willie Mays said that Barry had three good productive years left…2 of those 3 years have already gone (wasted) with the 2010 season coming up...

Barry is being punished by the powers that be not because he used a steroid like substance which wasn’t illegal let alone known by the general public at large…He is being punished because he is not just a strong black man but a defiant one who refuses to know his place and play ball by their rules…He is cut from the same unforgivable Blackness cloth like boxing great Jack Johnson…He is also like Jim Brown: a Black athlete who knows his true worth and limits…

He is being crucified like Mike (Jackson) because he wants to control the economics that control his destiny…He is the only major leaguer in its 30 years history to opt out of the MLB licensing program…You know that’s the program which allows Major League Baseball to act as a baseball players’ de facto agent in terms of representing them for licensing agreements say for a company to use their likeness in a video game…Barry shrewdly reasoned why should he deal with a middle man when he could probably get a better percentage of the profits from the interested business entities dealing with them directly…Barry Bonds is of the Sam Cooke and MJJ as in Michael Joseph Jackson School of Business philosophy: He rather run his own business than to make it somebody else’s business to run him…

That also means that Barry must pay the cost to be the boss and just like Michael they will be demonizing him until he is silenced...And that’s when they start to remake you in the image they see fit...They do not have to wait for you to die a physical death (for example look at Parkinson stricken Muhammad Ali and the multiple sclerosis ridden late great Richard Pryor for recent examples) in order to revamp you…They can make you so irrelevant and misrepresented through the use of the state controlled corporate media apparatus that you will become unrecognizable to the masses that you once appealed to as well as well placed co-signing propaganda for your enemies who despised you (think of the postmortem image emasculation/neutering of MLK )…To paraphrase Malcolm, the media is the most powerful entity on earth and it has the power to make your friends your enemies and vice versa…

Within three years times Bonds would have accomplished something that would have provided enough substantive facts and figures to prove that he was not only quite possibly the greatest left handed hitter ever, but the greatest hitter that ever lived…

One of the main reasons that Bonds was shut out is because baseball is truly a white man’s game again...Less than 9 percent of the current players are African Americans and there is only one Black general manager in all of baseball with no black owners…To add further insult is the fact as recently as 2005 that the Houston Astros became the first team in 40 plus years to not have an African American baseball player on their team during a world series…

Bonds even in his early 40s was one of the best hitters in the game still and although he may not have been the brilliant all around player he once was, Bonds could have substantively contributed a homerun power surge to any American League team just one player away in needing to make a late season run into immortality…Bonds could have been the extra bat that the Red Sox could have used to help them win World Series number 3 in a decade or he could have helped the Yankees to win more than just one world series win that same decade...Could you imagine what he could have done in Yankee Stadium then and now if the Yankees had the balls to ante up and sign him???

I actually believe what happened was that Bonds was considered a pariah and bad news as he was suppose to be the poster boy for what was wrong with baseball…The owners probably conspired among themselves not sign him in order to put the steroid era solidly behind them…Needless to say that they were shortsighted thanks in large part to the muckraking of none other than fellow Bonds 40/40 club member Jose Canseco (only 4 players have had 40 homeruns and 40 stolen bases in one season: Jose Canseco, Barry Bonds, Alex Rodriguez and Alfonso Soriano) whose book exposed the MLB world of loose morals and high octane steroid consumption okayed by the powers that be from the commissioner’s office to the clubhouse for the world at large…Steroid use was a big public secret for all to see…As in the nihilistic movie Casino, nobody cared how the money was made and got there, as long as it kept coming and in bunches…

I remember as an incoming freshman at Washington University in St. Louis I was reading an article about the then historic and nationally celebrated homerun chase between Mark McGwire of the St. Louis Cardinals and Sammy Sosa of the Chicago Cubs…I read an article in the St. Louis Post Dispatch where some reporters asked Mark McGwire if he was using a drug known as androstene or “andro”, which was outlawed by the NFL but wasn’t by the MLB…He said yes and told them that it wasn’t illegal by MLB standards...They complied with Big Mac and went back to kissing his ass...In other words they gave him a pass and try not to emphasize that his prodigious homerun totals that year wasn’t what they now call “natural”...

Now fast forward to several years later when Mark is testifying before U.S. Congress in tears trying to say that he doesn’t want to talk about the past…Hell he is on record already confessing to using something which wasn’t illegal to use so why is he crying (read whining)??? And why in the hell is Congress wasting tax dollars grilling a grown ass man over a kid’s game when 40 million plus American citizens are without health care insurance??? And the same hypocrites who were writing homoerotic love letters in their sports columns to him in 1998 are now trying to keep him out of Cooperstown??? Hell hath no fury like a journalist scorned…Only in America…

And fast forwarding to 2012, Barry’s first year of eligibility for Hall of Fame consideration if the powers that be decide not to let him come back in the foreseeable future, it will be interesting the excuse these schmucks will use to keep a 7 time MVP, 14 all-star, 8 time gold glove winner, all time walks and career and season homerun leader out of the most illustrious lineup in all of baseball…


The Big Payback: Bonds About To Get Even With The MLB...


(Ron Herd II a.k.a. R2C2H2 Tha Artivist Is Author Of The Award Winning James Reese Europe: Jazz Lieutenant http://www.jazzlieutenant.blogspot.com. He is also the creator of W.E. A.L.L. B.E. News http://www.weallbe.blogspot.com, Radio http://www.blogtalkradio.com/weallbe & TV http://www.youtube.com/weallbetv. He can be reached at r2c2h2@gmail.com)

No comments: