Like a Moth to the Flame …

… am I drawn to these Barry Bonds record-tying and -breaking home runs. I can’t take my eyes off of it. I have watched six more Giants games this year than I have in my entire life. The previous record was one, when my brother Sean got married out in San Francisco in 1992. For some reason, I need to see this home run. I don’t want him to succeed because he’s a jerk and I do want him to succeed because it may be the tough love karma slap baseball needs for allowing Mark McGuire and Sammy Sosa to plunder Roger Maris’ record.

So far I have not been disappointed in the quality of the games for their sideshow quality. Every night there seems to be a 25% chance he will even get a pitch to hit. Thursday night Brett Tomko bravely went at him in his first at bat. His pitches landed around the strike zone hilariously similar to the way doves land in my cat-patrolled back yard.

The first sideshow was the lottery-winning reaction Dontrelle Willis had when he got Bonds to pop up in front of home plate. The next gem was delivered by lifelong Giants fan and now minor deity Jon Lovitz. The man who famously capped-off the Michael Dukakis/George Bush election by saying, “Great! Now we all have to endure the next four years of fucking Dana [Carvey] doing Bush.” Ever since then I have always liked Jon. My next stop on the Jon Lovitz is God tour came when my brother Andrew forwarded on to me a story from the entertainment section of a Kansas City newspaper about Jon Lovitz smashing Andy Dick’s head into a bar for making a smartass remark about Phil Hartman’s demise. Ha! I instantly forgave him for those Subway commercials.

So the ESPN producers send out their reasonably attractive in-game reporter – whose name is not important because she’s probably so fired – to go scout out some Hollywood type famous folks in the crowd. The best she can come up with is Jon Lovitz (I’m still amazed he was the most famous person she could locate, did she forget her glasses or will no one say anything nice about this guy on the record). She proceeds to ask Lovitz the same question everybody asks anyone about Bonds and his historic chase of Hank Aaron’s home-run record. Something to the tune of “What do you think about Bonds?” He treated the question like it was Andy Dick’s head and rattled off a venomous five-minute rant about what an asshole Bud Selig is. How in no way did he find it conceivable Selig didn’t know about the steroid problem in baseball all those years. He called for Selig to resign! I felt like jumping up on my coffee table shouting “O Captain, My Captain!” Tweedle boring and Tweedle annoying up in the broadcast booth must have been stunned agape. The ambiguous sideline reporter was trying really hard not to laugh throughout the sermon and somehow found the wherewithal to utter a well-that-could-have-gone-better quip about how Lovitz should get his own headset and finish the game up in the booth.

It was some terrific live TV. If you got to see it, you now know why the Bonds home run is the most important thing to happen to baseball since the McGuire/Sosa run for Maris’ record. It is the airing of some pretty dirty laundry. A clinic in what happens when money trumps integrity. Bonds may not have hit a home run that night but Jon Lovitz sure did. Yeah … that’s the ticket! (If you were born in the Eighties replace “Yeah … that’s the ticket” with “Eat fresh!” If you were born in the Nineties see if you can’t find a copy of that on the Internet for me.)