Even an A-hole Can Change His Pinstripes

There are times when I think people are a-holes and not a thng is done to ever change my thought on that. Sometimes news will come out vindicating the person from whatever I thought occurred  for me to categorize them in such a way, and sometimes nothing ever happens and they remain, for all eternity, an a-hole.

BUT, here is a rare instance when my feeling has been reversed. It’s between me and a major name in professional baseball. It’s about me and Barry Bonds.

He was drafted by the Giants in 1982 out of high school, but he turned them down when the best offer they made to him was $70,000. So, he went to college. Living in Arizona, I watched Bonds play his college baseball as a skinny kid at Arizona State University. He was first team All-America and it was well-deserved. At ASU he batted .347 with 45 home runs and 175 runs batted in. He was electric.

I won’t say much about his professional career.  He first played for the Pittsburgh Pirates, and then later with the San Francisco Giants. It might be interesting to point out that in 1992, just ten years after he turned down the $70,000 Giants originally offered, they gave him a contract for $43.75 million over three years. At the time, it was the largest contract ever in any professional sport.

But this post isn’t about Bonds on the field, or what he did in the clubhouse. This is about what he did a monh ago.

Bryan Stow, 42, is not a professional athlete. He’s a San Francisco Giants baseball fan and until March 31, he served the public as an Emergency Medical Technician; a paramedic. His name may sound familiar. Bryan is the Giants fan who was brutally attacked on Opening Day at Dodger Stadium for apparently no other reason than wearing his Giants jersey to the game. Stow sustained brain damage from the attack and has been in and out of a medically-induced coma since the beating.

Just this week, police in L.A. arrested one of the thugs and charged him with the beating.

According to Thomas Gerardi, the attorney for the Stow family, on April 22, Barry Bonds visited the family, and without fanfare, said he would cover the college expenses for Stow’s two children who are currently in grade school.  No mention was made to the media then and it would have still been a secret had Girardi not revealed it to the media.

I can’t say I was a Bonds hater prior to this, but he was not one of my faves, either, but on this one I have to say, “well done, Barry.”