Still plenty, way too many, good seats available for Bonds

MILWAUKEE (AP) — There were still plenty, way too many, good seats available.

And therein lies the problem.

On a balmy September summer evening at Miller Park, Barry Bonds, arguably the best player there ever was, had a chance to go where only two men in baseball history had gone before. And unless you were an eBay seller who absolutely had to be behind the outfield walls with a chance to catch his 700th home run ball, you could pretty much sit wherever you wanted.

Try doing that at a taping of ”Oprah” this season.

As it turned out, an announced crowd of 27,209 went home not just empty-handed — but disappointed as well as the San Francisco Giants stayed front and center in the National League wild-card race with a 3-2 win over the Brewers.

Despite going 0-for-2, Bonds made his usual monster contribution to the cause. He walked twice, once intentionally, scored a run and made the game-saving play by throwing Milwaukee's Bill Hall out at the plate in the bottom of the sixth inning as he tried to score from second on a single.

And just as typically, Bond refused to talk about any of it afterward. A Giants' public relations employee stood in front of Bonds' locker, directing traffic in every direction except behind him.

Just down the hallway, in the small manager's office, Felipe Alou was calling that sixth-inning throw ”the biggest play of the game.” Across the clubhouse, San Francisco starter and winner Kirk Rueter marveled, ”Tonight he did it with his arm, made a great defensive play. He affects the game in a lot of ways.”

No argument there. But whether you believe all of those ways are good depends which side of the Bonds debate you're on.

The Tuesday night crowd was only 1,300 or so souls bigger than the Brewers' average, but it's two or three times what they normally draw on a Tuesday night in September once the Green Bay Packers — Wisconsin's real passion — begin their NFL season.

Milwaukee's baseball franchise has been hapless for so long that if nothing else, it certainly appreciated the bump at the gate. The Brewers haven't been to a World Series in 22 years, their last winning season was a dozen years ago and their sagging fortunes have been reflected in the attendance figures. In an expensive bid to reverse course, ownership replaced scraggly old County Stadium with spiffy new Miller Park three years ago, just as Bonds and baseball's home-run coming-out party was beginning to peak.

Back then, commissioner Bud Selig and the suits running baseball figured that if one Mark McGwire-Sammy Sosa duel sold tickets, then dozens of them would sell plenty more. When the home run race still seemed fresh, Nike trotted out actress Heather Locklear in an ad with the slogan, ”Chicks dig the long ball,” but being married to the phenomenon has turned to be a different story.

Miller Park, like all but a few of the retro ballyards built over the last 15 years, has become exactly the kind of launching pad baseball desired. The average number of homers hit the last three years at County was 166; at Miller Park, the number is 206. But those numbers have done little to raise the Brewers profile, in the NL standings or at the gate, and it hasn't helped a handful of towns that made similar gambles.

No one is more closely associated with the long ball these days than Bonds, and if the thrill isn't quite gone, it's certainly flickering. He won't play the aw-shucks character that endeared McGwire to millions and he can't do the comedy that made Sosa so embraceable.

More to the point, Bonds hasn't gotten the benefit of the doubt on the subject of performance-enhancers the way his bulked-up buddies did. But on that score, he's got nobody to blame but himself.

The shame is that what Bonds is accomplishing will never get its due. You can argue whether he's good or bad for baseball, but the chances are we won't see anyone like him for a long, long time. The guys he's going to pass eventually in his home-run trot, Babe Ruth and Henry Aaron, were once-every-few-generations talent, and Bonds is a more complete ballplayer than either.

His work ethic is unquestionable and there's nothing available over-the-counter — or under it, for that matter — that would bring any other ballplayer in the game to his level. He's leading the league in batting average despite getting fewer pitches to hit than anybody else, a contradiction that Brewers manager Ned Yost wrapped up this way: ”You don't want to admit this, but he's better than we are.”

He is — and everybody connected to the game knows it.

Whether they care to acknowledge it or not.

Jim Litke is a national sports columnist for The Associated Press. Write to him at jlitkeap.org