A Great Story, Never Written

Chicago correspondent and avid baseball fan Dean Reynolds blogs from San Francisco, where he spent a week covering Barry Bonds, waiting for the home run that wasn’t meant to be. I was going to write such a story. Women would have wrent their garments and grown men would have wept openly in the streets. I had lined up passages from Hemingway, Kafka and Lou Costello. There would have been allusions, metaphors and analogies to go along with every hit, run and error. I was going to describe the arc of the ball, splitting the azure blue sky and sent aloft not only by a wooden bat but also propelled by the love and devotion of thousands of Giants fanatics. There would have been the chagrin etched on the face of the hapless pitcher who served up the juicy offering to the Giant at the plate. The Dodgers were to be shaking their heads at the mammoth blast, cursing fate that had turned them into historical footnotes. The home run hitter himself would have been disarming as he recalled the feeling of circling the bases. He would have taken each and every question with a certain elan missing from his other encounters with the press. Reporters would have stood slack-jawed at his graciousness and class, admitting to themselves that, yes, he is a pretty charismatic guy after all. I would have found the fan who caught the ball, and he would have announced to me — exclusively — that he was offering to auction it off for a new wing at a children’s hospital in Iraq. The fan, a native of Bosnia, would have spoken of living the American dream and — in exchange for a buffet luncheon with Charlie Gibson — would have appeared at 4 a.m. pacific time on Monday to discourse about the spheroid that the heavens had sent his way. Then I would have given Barry Bonds a lift home in my National Rental Car Jaguar… er Sebring convertible. Alas, it was not to be. Bonds stunk up the joint, as they say. He managed one hit — a single — all week as I covered him. His predatory abilities did earn him eight walks, but by the end of Sunday’s game even his manager Felipe Alou said of his slugger, "I gotta say the last at-bat he looked slow. I’m not gonna talk anymore on Barry today." Hey, excuse me, Felipe. You have a tough job managing a team and trying to keep everybody happy while Bonds goes his own way, playing in games of his choosing and making plays in the field when he wants to. Based on a week’s worth of observation, Bonds looks like a liability to the Giants. And I’m trying to be as nice as I can. So the road show of great expectations now leads Bonds to Houston. But it will not include me or Drew Millhon, my intrepid producer. We are re-basing to the real world of tornadoes and high gasoline prices, debates over immigration and which federal agency was spying on whom and for what reason. Somebody else will have to write this great story.