Barry Bonds Should Have Been Able To Hit 800 Home Runs
June 13, 2007 by Sal Marinello
Filed under The Healthy Skeptic
As Barry Bonds stumbles towards to the home run finish line drawn by Hank Aaron, the focus should be on why the San Francisco slugger has labored so spectacularly down the stretch, and two words can explain why Bonds has fallen apart, Greg Anderson. Bonds’ jailed, former personal trainer is responsible for turning Barry’s cakewalk into the record books into a massive struggle.
In case you pulled a Rip Van Winkle for the past 5 years and don’t know who Greg Anderson is, I’ll clue you in. Anderson is the drug dealing personal trainer who worked with Barry Bonds and supplied him with drugs and an absolutely horrendous training program. From the day that Bonds started working with Anderson and got huge he has had a series of injuries that have caused Barry to experience a rapid, physical decline. And a bigger hat size. But I digress…
Certainly, steroids can contribute to soft tissue injuries, the bane of an athlete’s existence. However, if you look at the ridiculously inappropriate training program that Anderson “designed” for Bonds, you’ll find the real reason Bonds has broken down. Anderson needlessly prescribed a body builders’ drug and training regimen for an all-time, once-in-a-generation, world-class athlete. As a result, the drugs added pounds of unneeded muscle while Anderson ran Bonds through a training program that placed an exorbitant amount of stress on the joints and connective tissue of the ballplayer.
What Greg Anderson did was take a training program that was designed for a meathead body builder, and apply it to the finely tuned machine that was Barry Bonds. Bonds suffered a major injury to his elbow in 1999, the first season Anderson’s program was in full swing. Barry’s connective tissue gave out due to the stress of coping with the over training and the over drugging prescribed by the Anderson plan, and the slugger played in only 102 games and missed a lot of at-bats.
Rather than take this as an indication that Anderson didn’t know what he was doing, Bonds stayed the course in his pursuit of his Moby Dick, the long ball.
Despite all of the damage that Bonds did at the plate, more severe damage was being done to his body. The juice and the ridiculous training program were wearing down the body of the once fleet, great fielding outfielder. Fans and members of the media were seduced by Barry’s muscles and his home runs, but were blind to the fact that he had become a lumbering behemoth in the field and on the base paths.
Over the past 4 seasons Bonds has been paying the piper. He missed all but 14 games of the 2005 season, and the affects of his knee injury were felt last season as well. Bonds’ left knee is shot. In 130 games last season he hit 26 home runs but his .270 batting average was 30 points lower than his career average. Swinging for Aaron’s record took its toll on Bonds’ batting average.
All the games and at-bats that Bonds has lost – thanks to Anderson – has robbed him of his chance to hit 800 career home runs and put a strangle hold on the home run record. If Bonds does pass Aaron this year, we’ll only have a season or two before people turn their eyes to Alex Rodriguez – aka A Rod – as he closes in on Bonds. If he stays healthy, A Rod will pass Bonds in 2013 and will be the first man to hit 800 career home runs.
This year Bonds looks like he’d be overmatched in an over-40 fast pitch softball league. Despite a good start to the season, Bonds is shot. He cannot run the bases at all and is a complete liability in the outfield. All athletes slow down as they reach the end of their careers, but Bonds’ has suffered a blow out on a massive scale not seen since Mark McGwire broke down during the 2001 season.
The sad thing is, even if he wanted to use performance-enhancing drugs (PEDs), Bonds didn’t have to go out this way. It’s ironic that a guy who was notorious for not listening to anyone but himself took the word of a muscle-headed meathead drug dealer, and this guy ruined Bonds’ career and his legacy. Rather than seek out the advice of people who knew how to use the PEDs and how to train, one of the greatest baseball players of the past 2 generations hooked up with a local gym rat who’s methods were 2 generations obsolete.
Greg Anderson currently sits in jail because he won’t testify before the grand jury investigating Bonds. There’s been speculation that Anderson is keeping quiet in order to protect his former client from the long arm of the law. Perhaps the real reason Anderson has chosen jail over freedom is that he’s afraid of Bonds. Anderson might figure he’s safer in jail than he is out and about, where Bonds – who knows Anderson did him wrong - could get his hands on him. Either way, given what he’s done to Bonds, Anderson deserves jail.
Bonds may very well still break Aaron’s record, but he will do it ugly. And it didn’t have to be that way.
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