This is a continuation of yesterday’s post on why Barry is good for baseball.  So for your reading enjoyment here is why Barry is bad for baseball and should just retire.

1) It’s about the kids.  I am not one who believes that kids who listen to that “gangsta rap” and watch violent movies are going straight to hell in a hand basket. I myself might have listened to a few explicit lyrics and watched a few violent movies as a kid, and I am not affiliated with any gangs nor am I an ax murderer.  However, I do think that steroids in sports has an impact on amateur athletes.  I am actually more concerned with parents seeing stars like Barry and “testing” it out with their kids.  In the age of the helicopter parents, parents who send their kids to school, pick them up and take them to to T-ball, followed by their Spanish class, followed by their Chinese tutor, followed by piano…

You have parents who want their kids to be great and I think it is a very fine line between some parents hiring a full-time trainer and some parents popping pills into their kids. Parents are crazy - trust me, I have a 9 month old and I have over 1,000 pictures on flickr of just him.  I think seeing sports stars like Barry, achieving rare accomplishments and becoming numb to the news of steroids, some overzealous parent will think this is the way to achieve little Joey’s dreams. It’s already happening and I bet we will hear more of it.

2) It allows Jose Canseco to keep writing books.  The longer Barry Bonds, Roger Clemens etc., are around the game the more exposure it is going to give to guys like Canseco.  He released the first book Juiced and it actually helped open up dialog about steroids, and I think, was one of the biggest pushes that MLB got to investigate the issue further.  The only problem is that now he is releasing another book on the eve of another MLB season and is implicating more players. The issue is that Canseco has an agenda…he needs and or wants to make money.  He can go on writing and implicating players with little recourse.  The quicker the issue dies, the quicker he becomes irrelevant again.

3) The longer Barry sticks around the more the steroid issue will be front and center.  Baseball is coming off a banner year in terms of attendance.  There is a ton of buzz heading into the season and the last thing the game needs is more Barry.  Most likely at some point in the season there is going to be news about the Federal investigation and Barry would again, if in uniform, be front and center.  And as much as I like seeing Selig squirm, I think the game needs to move on.

4) More Congressional hearings. I don’t know if this would really happen, but again as steroids continues to be an issue Congress is still going to keep it as part of their political agenda.  The one thing we learned from the last hearing was that politicians have very little care for actually finding out answers or helping the league reform.  The same politicians that were chummy chummy with Clemens leading up to the hearings were the same who lambasted him during the testimony.  All they want is to  create this self-aggrandizing stage from which they can make political hay in the name of protecting the game.  It’s was a sham the first two times around and a third round would just be comical.

5) He is a jerk…a talented jerk but a jerk nonetheless.   He and Clemens and others of their ilk need to go quietly.  They think they are bigger than the game and unfortunately their hubris is what got them in their current situation.  Barry, as talented and as good as he was, does nothing for the game other than drag it down.  It’s time to let the Bonds era end.