Prometheus 6

Bonds deserves far better than to sit out the season unsigned.The overriding ethos of the sports world is that of a meritocracy. If you are good enough, you get to play. Yet a man who got on base 48% of the time last year can't find a new home.

The possible blackballing of Bonds by baseball owners is about more than a baseball player. It's about people in power deciding on grounds unrelated to talent and performance who gets to take the field, who gets to be heard and even who gets to be remembered in history. And it smacks of Stalin.

Erasing Barry Bonds from baseball history
The former slugger hasn't just been sidelined from baseball, it's as if he has never played.
By Dave Zirin
May 18, 2008

'The Commissar Vanishes" is not your usual coffee-table book. Using photographs, it shows how Josef Stalin systematically erased memories of his chief political opponents from the history of the Russian revolution. In one photo, the dictator appears next to Leon Trotsky. In others, the images of Trotsky have been either airbrushed or crudely blacked out.

Barry Bonds has become the Leon Trotsky of Major League Baseball.