On Sunday, May 7th, during a post-game interview that followed a game against the Phillies in which he had hit - no, crushed...literally - his 713th home run, Barry Bonds was asked to comment on the difference between his 13th home run, also hit in Philadelphia (although of course in the old Veterans Stadium), and his latest blast. "A 7," was Bonds' reply.

And who can blame him? The fact is that reporters ask Bonds questions that are so cliché that it would be pointless for me to even demonstrate their worthlessness by inserting a cliché here. If you’ve ever listened to any of his rare interviews, you’ll know that Bonds comes across as a very intelligent man, even if he does resort to dumb tactics like standing with his son and squeezing out tears in an attempt to garner sympathy. But this is precisely where Bonds’ real problem lies: the media hates him. They hate him, not because he did (or didn’t do) steroids or because he is about to pass Babe Ruth on the all-time home run list, but because he makes reporters’ lives difficult. He won’t give them easy sound bites or meaningless Bull Durham-esque quotes like, “We just went out there and, you know, played the right way,” probably because he has better things to do with his time.

Bonds, of course, is currently under suspicion of having taken steroids, and the ongoing Mitchell investigation is most likely a direct result of the recent publication of the Game of Shadows, a book written by two reporters, which showcases Bonds’ alleged steroids regimen. According to the book, Bonds began using steroids in 1998 because he was jealous of the attention that Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa received after their record-breaking seasons. It argues that taking steroids does not only amount to cheating, plain and simple, but when baseball’s biggest stars take steroids impressionable high school and even middle school players could be inspired to take them as well, enormously harming their youthful bodies. This is all true. Nevertheless, what are we really talking about here?

Barry Bonds has never been arrested for doing coke, like Darryl Strawberry or Doc Gooden. He’s never gotten stopped in his car with a hooker, like Denny Neagle, who at the time was sucking in nineteen million of the Colorado Rockies’ money without having pitched for them in over two years (for anybody who was wondering why Colorado has been so bad for the last 6 plus seasons). He hasn’t killed anybody. He hasn’t robbed anybody. He hasn’t raped anybody. He hasn’t come into anybody’s house and slapped their dog. And, even if the allegations prove true and he did take steroids, at least he didn’t pull a Rafael Palmeiro and get up in front of a Congressional committee, under oath, and loudly proclaim that he had never taken steroids. His suggestion that anybody insinuating otherwise should be publicly beaten, fell on deaf ears, as he was to test positive a mere six weeks later.

The worst case scenario of Bonds’ steroid use projects that he started his injection regimen after the 1998 season. Nobody has claimed that he began it before that point in his career, during which he hit 471 home runs in 13 seasons, one shortened by a strike. This means that two thirds of his home runs are unquestionably clean. If you accept Jose Canseco’s assertion in his book Juiced that stars like McGwire or Palmeiro began using steroids as early as 1992 or 1993, it is even more remarkable that Bonds accomplished all that he did by this time.

I’m not trying to prove that Bonds is a lovable man who just happened to be the victim of slander and attacks. He has cheated on his wife, choked his mistress, been a pretty lousy teammate, and may have lied to a grand jury about knowingly taking steroids. I do feel, however, that he has received a disproportionate amount of criticism and scrutiny. Jason Giambi’s apology for nothing in particular has already been all but forgotten, as his 2005 AL Comeback Player of the Year award attests. Hell, Mark McGwire was invited back for the opening of Busch Stadium III in 2005. And this is where the media fits in.

Widespread hatred is the media’s revenge on Barry Bonds. He’s been portrayed a bad guy because that is what the media has arbitrarily chosen. And they do this simply because he refuses to give them the time of day. Bonds has been universally booed in every road stadium he’s gone to this year and then bombarded with various paraphernalia, from syringes to signs with an asterisk on them. Even at his home park in San Francisco, where fans show him at least a modicum of respect, somebody paid for an anti-Bonds billboard right outside the stadium. Why do fans do this? I don’t have anything personal against Barry. And unless he has knocked down fans’ doors and stolen from their cookie jars, most fans shouldn’t either. It seems that, with regards to Bonds, at least, the media’s agenda has become our own.

I don’t respect Bonds’ steroids usage, or his often confrontational behavior. Besides he certainly doesn’t need my sympathy; he’s got his millions of dollars to take his mind off of a few unhappy customers. What I do respect, however, is that he is an intelligent man, one of the greatest baseball players of all time (steroids or not) and his alleged “crime” is much less heinous than those many professional athletes are accused of today. I sometimes wonder if the media blitz about Bonds has caused us to lose our perspective. In the middle of his post-game interview, people firing questions about the game that had just ended, one reporter randomly asked Bonds about Game of Shadows. “Are we here to talk about baseball or steroids?” snarled Bonds, his usual glowering, unsympathetic sense. That, I fear, is a question most fans can not answer.