If Jeff Kent were black

The San Francisco Giants' All-Star second baseman got off easy for blasting Barry Bonds to Sports Illustrated, because the media likes him and hates Bonds. Could race (say it isn't so!) have anything to do with it?

By Joan Walsh

Aug. 30, 2001 | SAN FRANCISCO -- I was one of a handful of white people at a Los Angeles bar recently when the television flashed baseball highlights, and there was San Francisco Giants star Barry Bonds, hitting home runs No. 52 and 53 against the Florida Marlins. Even here in Dodgerland, everyone turned to the television and cheered Bonds' achievement wildly, marveling at the earringed 37-year-old closing in on Mark McGwire's 1998 70-home-run record.

But then the mood turned grim. "They're not gonna let him do it," one guy said to his friends, who all nodded sadly in assent. After all, "they" -- the white men who run baseball, presumably -- didn't let Sammy Sosa pass McGwire, everyone agreed. Bonds won't see many pitches to hit in the weeks to come, they predicted -- he would break the all-time walks record before he hit 70 home runs.

I winced, but I didn't bother to argue. Certainly I remember the racist abuse Hank Aaron endured when he broke Babe Ruth's lifetime home run record in 1974, and there's no denying black players face slights that whites don't. But if baseball managers refuse to let Bonds "do it" -- by walking him more, rather than challenging him -- it will of course have nothing to do with race. The Giants are in the heat of a race for the post-season, just like Sosa's Cubs were in 1998, while McGwire's third-place St. Louis Cardinals were in a race to get home to their golf clubs.

It's always sad to me when race shows up where it's irrelevant, and I'm convinced it's irrelevant in this year's thrilling home run chase. I've never thought race had much to do with Bonds' reputation for churlishness, either. He is rude to reporters, and sometimes to fans as well. But I thought about those black baseball conspiracy theorists when I read Rick Reilly's Sports Illustrated column blasting the Giants superstar last week, and the media firestorm that followed. Reilly reamed Bonds for his surliness, his focus on his own stats and his trademark failure to run out ground balls. What gave the piece rare power was Reilly's liberal quoting of National League MVP Jeff Kent, who blasted his superstar teammate.

"On the field, we're fine, but off the field, I don't care about Barry and Barry doesn't care about me. Or anybody else," Kent told Reilly. "He doesn't answer questions. He palms everybody off on us, so we have to do his talking for him. But you get used to it. Barry does a lot of questionable things ... I was raised to be a team guy, and I am, but Barry's Barry. It took me two years to learn to live with it, but I learned."

Reilly's criticism of Bonds was bad enough, but Kent's made the S.I. piece a national sports scandal. Still, I was struck by the fact that few sportswriters blasted Kent for breaching his own supposed "team-first" ethics by attacking a teammate, in the heat of a pennant race no less. The San Francisco Chronicle's Scott Ostler took a few mild potshots, in two mostly humorous columns, and the paper's Bruce Jenkins buried a smart two-sentence critique of Kent's mouthing off midway through a Saturday sports-wrap column.

But nobody blasted Kent head-on. (In print, anyway: On sports-talk KNBR radio, he took some heat from hosts and callers.) A week later, the local media consensus seems to be that the controversy, in the end, was good for the Giants: Bonds' defenders say it strengthened the team around Barry; Bonds' detractors say it exposed a clubhouse cancer that needed to be detected as the first step toward treatment.

That's just silly. There's no way the late-August dustup helped the team: The Giants were on a best-of-season roll before the Reilly column, winning 20 of 26, and they're 2-6 in the week or so since. Kent himself has been struggling at the plate, hitting under .200 over the last week. The team's minislump may well be a fated, late-season dip (the Giants' trademark) more than a reaction to Reilly, but a pennant-chasing team can't help but be hurt by such distractions.

More important, the Reilly flap exposed a double standard in coverage of the Giants, Bonds and Kent that's sloppy and lazy and maybe even partly racial. Worst of all, it showed the amazing extent to which reporters' own experience of a sports star -- the petty slights or the charm and flattery -- can control the way they cover him, and how the star is in turn perceived by fans. Kent and Bonds are in many ways brothers under the skin: proud, hardworking, self-critical loners, family men with few friends on the team. Both have been known to stare through fans like they didn't exist and stonewall kids' requests for autographs.

In short, in some ways both guys are cocky assholes, but one is white and dutifully answers reporters' questions, while the other is black and does not. Guess which one's the media darling?

Next page: Barry, you're no Tony Gwynn