Feeling Bad for Bonds

As I sit here writing this post, Barry Bonds is still without a team while Isiah Thomas still holds his job. Apparently doing steroids puts you in the dog-house, despite your performance aiding your team to victory, while sexually harassing women and losing almost all your games is now acceptable. Does this bother anyone besides me? At least Bonds was helping his team to win. And last time I checked, he didn't get sued for 12 million bucks from an angry chick. Maybe the Pacers guy will fix this problem for good.

(Maybe Jay Z will get control of the team somehow and sign every ridiculous player from Lebron to Kobe Bryant. Let's face it: what NBA player wouldn't want to play for a team owned by Jay Z? They would have the sickest parties and warm-up music.)

Back to Bonds -- Not only is Bonds without a team, his former club is removing pictures of him at the field / clubhouse. It seems slightly hypocritical that the Giants would cleanse themselves of Bonds to this extent. It's as if they're trying to pretend that Bonds never played there, despite the fact that he sold them a ton of tickets and got them a ton of publicity. At the end of the day, however, how can they say "we never knew he did steroids"? It's slightly ridiculous.

Of course they knew and of course they went along with it until steroids got out of control. I would argue they were complaisant with Bonds during his hay-day and they had no problem back then. As anyone who owns a Bonds Pirates Topps card can tell you, it's beyond obvious that this guy was doing drugs. Teams would be lying if they flat out denied that he was a user based on his first seasons in the league.

Yet the Giants hung Bonds out to dry as soon as public opinion went against steroid use in the league. In no way do I defend Bonds and his drug use, yet I strangely find myself feeling bad for this guy -- the Giants are just completely hanging him out to dry here. Pathetic, really.

Moving on - the Nationals have a new baseball stadium. $611 million dollars, half of what it's costing the Yankees to build their new stadium. I could write an extremely long and detailed post about the Nats, but you know what? I'll hold off for now. I'd like to actually visit the park before I give the room of zen a solid review. And let's be honest: this is a New England / MidAtlantic Sports forum, not a DC sports type thing. The Nats have the second lowest pay-roll in the league, and until they get good, no one really gives a you know what.

Everyone who follows the NBA is obsessed the Western Conference. Every time you turn on ESPN, one of their announcers is slobbering over which 50 win team is going to make the playoffs, or which Western conference player is going to get the MVP. Frankly I'm getting tired of this BS very very quickly. Why can't the Eastern conference be discussed on ESPN? Right now there's an awesome contest for the final seeding, and the finish should be fun to watch. If the Wizards go down in the first or second round (which by the way, may not happen if Gilbert stays healthy and starts playing well again), I'm gonna pull for the Celts to beat the crap out of a Western Conference team.

I'm just tired of hearing about how good the Mavericks are when they're healthy or how Houston is going to pull an upset over the Lakers or Spurs. It's as if ESPN, TNT and Comcast all got together and said, "let's ignore the fact that the Eastern Conference even exists." Not cool.