King Kaufman's Sports Daily

Barry Bonds love-a-thon in S.F. We'll root for any scoundrel as long as he's on our team. Why?

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April 7, 2006 | "The Bay Has Much Love For You Barry" read the sign held up by a fan in the left-field bleachers at Renamed Communications Park in San Francisco Thursday. Much love, but no punctuation.

After three days of being booed and heckled and targeted by syringe tossers in that notoriously tough, intense town down the coast, San Diego, embattled slugger Barry Bonds was the star of a lovefest Thursday at the Giants' home opener.

Giants fans showed a remarkable moral flexibility in showering Bonds with love because he plays for the home team. "Barry 25 Hometown Hero" read another banner.

I suppose it's possible Bay Area fans would have much love for Barry if he'd never left the Pittsburgh Pirates, in the sense that it's possible you could be nominated for an Oscar next year, but it's safe to assume that Bonds is a hero because he's hometown, not a hero who happens to be hometown.

This is a familiar dynamic to sports fans, of course, and predates BALCO, steroids and the Great Expanding Cranium by the Bay by at least a hundred years. Many a player has been the object of derision and scorn in many a ballpark -- until the day he gets traded to that park's home team, at which point he becomes a hometown hero.

Just the other day Salon executive editor Gary Kamiya was telling me about experiencing this phenomenon when Deion Sanders signed with the San Francisco 49ers. Kamiya hated Sanders, but when the former Atlanta Falcon donned a Niners jersey, all of a sudden obnoxiousness looked like charisma, prima donna attitude looked like the justifiable eccentricity of genius.

Until Sanders headed to the Dallas Cowboys the next year, at which point he magically transformed back to his old hated self.

But that's different. It's fun and games. Silliness. With Bonds we're talking about a guy who's a pariah all over the country, right up to the halls of Congress. He's at the center of a serious national issue, one that involves the health of our kids, and he's the most prominent athlete whose unspoken message to those kids, many parents and educators say, is: If you don't juice, you don't have a chance.

It's one thing to forgive and forget the wearing of a visiting uniform and embrace the new guy on the home team, or to turn on a hometown star when he comes back in road duds. Harmless high jinks. It's another to put aside your values, your sense of right and wrong, when they get in the way of root, root, rooting for the home team.

Next page: San Francisco isn't unique. Home players all over can do no wrong -- except play poorly. Plus: Fantasy fandom, Maggie Dixon