Ball bidder irks Bonds, but why?

When sports fans read in the morning newspaper that San Francisco Giants baseball player Barry Bonds considers the guy who bought his record-breaking 756th home run ball to be an idiot, many probably found themselves in agreement, albeit for the wrong reason, as it would turn out.

I’d guess they had supposed that Bonds was referring to the fact that a California fashion designer had, in a recent online auction, paid $752,467 for the ball that Bonds hit out of the ballpark last month to break Hank Aaron’s long-standing record of 755 career home runs. Paying more than three-quarters of a million bucks for a single baseball, no matter its provenance, certainly would seem to flag the purchaser as having nitwit tendencies.

But that wasn’t what set off Bonds. Truth be known, the supremely arrogant slugger whose ego is every bit as impressive as his massive body probably figured the ball was worth at least twice what the high bidder paid for it, if for no other reason than it had come off his (Bond’s) bat.

No, what apparently got the man all worked up over the deal was the fact that the purchaser had set up a Web site that lets visitors vote on three options for the ball. One option is to give it to the Baseball Hall of Fame at Cooperstown, N.Y., no strings attached. A second option is to brand it with an asterisk before sending it off to Cooperstown, suggesting that Bonds’ record is tainted by an alleged steroid use that he has repeatedly denied. The third option is to blast the ball into outer space at the next scheduled rocket launch.

“All of those options don’t weigh anything. In baseball, that number [756] still stands,” Bonds told a reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle. “He’s stupid. He’s an idiot,” Bonds said of the baseball’s new owner, Marc Ecko. “He spent $750,000 on the ball and that’s what he’s doing with it?”

For his part, Ecko said he’s considering designing a custom T-shirt for Bonds with a message that states, “Marc Ecko paid $752,467 for my ball, and all I got was this stupid T-shirt.”

I suppose that while he’s at it, Ecko could also design a T-shirt for himself, using a variation on the theme: “I paid an Internet auctioneer $752,467 and all I got was this stupid baseball.”

Granted, Economics 101 teaches that a baseball, like real estate or a ticket to the hottest show on Broadway, is worth whatever someone is willing to pay for it. And Lord knows an individual has a right to spend his money as he chooses. To each his own, and all that. If we all liked to throw our money after the same things, how boring would that be?

Still, whenever I read that someone has laid out a truckload of cash to acquire an inanimate object that’s no good for anything much but sitting on a shelf some place – or, worse yet, reposing locked up for life in a stuffy bank vault with no hope of parole – I’m thankful the guy is not running the government.

If you or I had more money than we knew what to do with – fat chance though there may be of that ever happening – instinct tells me that our spending might be more creative. Perhaps nothing so narcissistic as the old cowboy depicted in a poster that I have hanging on a wall of my Greenville camp. The poster shows the aging free spirit bellied up to the bar, a big paw clasped around a mug of frothy beer. A caption states, “I spent most of my money on women and beer. The rest I just wasted.”

But I should think our game plan might lie more along that line than in purchasing baseballs that have been poleaxed out of some major league ballpark by a multi-millionaire muscle-bound jock allegedly juiced on steroids.

In any case, it probably won’t be long until someone with more money than brains lands the next hottest item to be auctioned on the Internet: O.J. Simpson’s anticipated newest book about the recent Las Vegas hotel sports-memorabilia break-in that has landed him in trouble. Again.

Alluding to Simpson’s recent book, “If I Did It,” about how he didn’t murder his ex-wife and her friend 13 years ago, Newsweek magazine, tongue in cheek, reports that the title of the book will be “If I Did It, Part Deux.”

With this guy’s growing rap sheet, there could be more “If I Did It” sequels than there are Rambo movies. Let the bidding begin.

BDN columnist Kent Ward lives in Limestone. Readers may contact via e-mail at olddawg@bangordailynews.net.