Barry Bonds Is Boring; Hating The Yankees Is, Like, So Last Year

Ritchie's favorite team is the Phillies, but when John Kruk can outperform the entire roster from the ESPN announce booth, Ritchie needs to find other baseball things to talk about.

Has anyone noticed that hating Barry Bonds has become, dare I say, passe? Everyone knows what he did. No one takes the record seriously. He'll certainly pass Hank Aaron's mark and it will all be rather anticlimactic. Sure, even when he was juiced he still had to work hard and he still had to hit the ball and he was more than likely facing some less than 100 percent natural pitching stock to boot. None of that makes his record legit. If anything, the roided pitchers argument only proves the point that an entire era of baseball numbers are meaningless, and for a game and fan base that live and die by numbers, that's pretty damning stuff.

All that is to say that now that Barry has decided to put up and shut up, taunting him just isn't as fun as it once was. His half-hearted self-defenses of the past two years were so unbelievably grating and nonsensical that it became our civic duty to guard the game from the persecution complex and absurd paranoia of one its most spectacular train wrecks. That's been done and when these record books are written, there will be no need for asterisks. Everyone will just already know.

And then there's the resurgent Arod. The "where have you been this whole time?" Arod, the Arod who went yard twice in Fenway last night and reached 12 fourbaggers quicker in a season than anyone else ever.

Everyone's saying the pressure's off of him because he knows he's leaving New York next year. Maybe he finally doesn't care what people say and is doing what he knows how to do best. He's not my favorite person in the world, but his work so far this season has been nothing short of masterful. The Yankees better drink it in now, because this time next year, he'll be wearing someone else's pinstripes.

The fact of the matter is that the New York establishment set Arod up for failure and he finally understands that. Imagine being the highest payed player in history and being brought to the biggest stage in your sport and to the team with the most storied legacy. Now imagine doing this as an All Star at your position and being forced to learn a new one so that Derek Sketer's feelings don't get hurt. I can admire management's loyalty to their long time captain, but they never should have put a player like Rodriguez in that position and Arod never should have accepted. His sub-Arod performances of the last few falls is the price he's paid for an otherwise lucrative mistake. Now that his time in baseball purgatory is over, the monkey's off his back and Arod's playing at Jeter rather than with him and I love it.

I'm no Yankees fan, but this is the first Yanks team in over 10 years that I could almost kind of root for, mostly because Arod is playing exciting ball and I want to see him do well: it's a good (and rare) thing when such a combination of enormous talent and bad judgement doesn't end in tragedy. I'm also lightening up on Jasom Giambi, the only honest member of the sordid steroid cast. I've always liked Bobby "Walkman" Abreu and even the Bowa Constictor's wearing Yankee stripes. You can't be a baseball fan and not love Mariano Rivera. But as long as Jeter's wearing Joe D's "C" this is a franchise I can't get soft on.