The Zong

I’ll bet Bud Selig’s pissed that he decided to attend last night’s game, a fiercely impotent battle between two mediocre bullpens that resulted in the Giants once again going gently into that home dugout after 13 innings that must have kept the cadaverous commish wondering how many garlic fries his constitution could possibly withstand.

He lives on, and his surprise attendance as Bonds approaches .250 adds little more than a shrug to the festivities at AT&T Park, where fans continue to pay good money to watch a storied, revered baseball franchise suffocate each night under the plastic sheet of ham-handed fuckery that the front office has draped over the entire proceeding. It is sad for me to imagine how different the situation might be if the Giants were actually in contention right now, controversy or no. As it is, when he finally does break the record (if they don’t indict him first) the cheers and applause will sound for all intents and purposes like a giant sigh of relief, and shortly thereafter you can expect attendance at the park to look more and more like a baseball game in Florida as the Giants stumble around blindly in the basement of one of the weakest divisions in baseball.

Check out the upper right hand corner of this page. The race between the number of Bonds’ homers (19) and the Giants’ number of games beneath .500 (16!) is actually becoming a race, and their status as the worst team in the majors gets stronger every day. As soon as he breaks the record, it will officially be football season in San Francisco. For several years.

- M.G.