How Should the Giants Handle Barry Bonds’ Number Retirement?

Content note: This story contains graphic descriptions of domestic abuse.

The San Francisco Giants announced earlier this month that they are retiring Barry Bonds’ number. It’s a deserved honor for the man who may remain absent from the Hall of Fame after a storied career that would most certainly be thought Cooperstown-worthy if not for the performance-enhancing drug use that hangs over his legacy like a cloud. Bonds is the all-time home run leader, a seven-time MVP, and the second-greatest hitter of all-time by fWAR. But for many people, his career will always be tainted by the fact that some of those accomplishments were aided by PEDs.

When the Hall of Fame voting came down last month, there were plenty of pieces published about why Bonds’ election remains elusive — and plenty more arguing that not electing Bonds does a disservice to his contributions to the game of baseball (with which I agree). But largely absent from these conversations is another scandal that should impact the way we remember Bonds and consider whether his legacy is deserving of the honors the numbers indicate it should be: his history of domestic violence.

We won’t have to relitigate Bonds’ candidacy in earnest again until next winter; Hall of Fame season is mercifully over. But the Giants’ announcement made me wonder what we say when we publicly celebrate ballplayers, and how we might strike a balance between acknowledging the accomplishments of men like Bonds and telling baseball’s story truthfully.

Bonds married Swedish-born Susann “Sun” Bonds in 1988, shortly after they met while she was working as a bartender in Montreal and he was an outfielder for the Pittsburgh Pirates. In their book Dark Shadows: Barry Bonds, BALCO, and the Steroid Scandal That Rocked Professional Sports, Mark Fainaru-Wada and Lance Williams describe the pairing as a “bad match,” saying that Bonds “wanted someone who would do what she was told.” Sun was not that person.

During their messy divorce proceedings in 1995, Sun testified to the abuse she suffered at Bonds’ hands. Among the allegations were that Bonds had locked her out of their home in the middle of the night while she was unclothed; that she was pushed into a bathtub while holding their infant son; and that he kicked her to the ground and knocked her unconscious while she was eight months pregnant.

“Barry was this big man who loved me one minute and the next minute was beating me up, and I didn’t know what to do,” she testified in San Mateo County Superior Court, according to SFGate. Her lawyer claimed she could not work due to the effects of the abuse, what he called “battered woman syndrome” and what is more commonly understood today to be the symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

Sun testified that Bonds beat her for the first time a few weeks after they married. She said that one time, he became physically abusive after she told him about a cosmetology job that she’d been offered and he didn’t want her to accept. According to the National Domestic Violence Hotline, not letting a partner work is a common tactic used by abusers that keeps the abused person financially dependent and more isolated, making it harder for victims to leave. In 1993, police were called to the home after an another altercation, though no charges were ever filed.

During the bitter divorce proceedings from Sun, Bonds met Kimberly Bell when she attended a Giants game with a friend in 1994. Fainaru-Wada and Williams outline the details of their relationship throughout Dark Shadows. Bell had a front row seat to Bonds’ descent into steroid abuse, which may have contributed to his anger.

His patterns of controlling and abusive behavior that he exhibited in his marriage to Sun continued in his relationship with Bell. Fainaru-Wada and Williams write that Bonds called Bell every morning at 8 to check in on her; he would let himself into her apartment with the key she had given him and leave her notes that said things like, “If you love me! Where are you. Who are you with. I have called you all night on your cell and home.” Bonds’ jealousy and possessiveness were apparent. Bonds told Bell they had “the perfect relationship” because she “did what she was told.”

According to Bell, as his steroid use escalated, so did his abusive behavior. “When his anger flared now, he would grab her, stand close to her face, and whisper intimidating, hurtful things. He insisted on knowing where she was at every hour of the day or night,” write Fainaru-Wada and Williams. “If he couldn’t find her, he would become enraged, and he told her he would kill her if he found out she was seeing someone else.” (At the time, Bonds was married to Liz Watson and having at least one other affair in addition to his relationship with Bell.)

He left abusive voicemails, sometimes threatening to kill her and, if she didn’t answer immediately, his calls became more frequent and his threats escalated. In 2003, in a hotel room in San Francisco, Bonds put his arm around Bell’s throat and told her, “If you ever f—–’ pull something like that again, I’ll kill you, do you understand me?” Bell’s flight from Arizona had been late getting in, and he was mad that his schedule had been thrown off for the day. Bell called the police and told them that a famous athlete had threatened to kill her but she hung up when asked for details.

Bonds steroid use often comes up in discussions of his past, but these violent incidents rarely do. In fact, many people do not even know about them despite the fact that they were testified to in court and have been documented in at least one book. It is part of a larger pattern in which athletes’ history of abuse is too often forgotten about or swept under the rug because it is seen as secondary to their athletic accomplishments.

This brings us to larger questions about whether and how we should celebrate abusers who have accomplished great feats of athleticism, and it forces us to confront what the Hall of Fame should be. In Bonds’ case, these incidents of violence are in the past, but then, so are the accomplishments. Number retirements and Hall of Fame inductions are in the business of reckoning with the past.

There is no easy answer to any of this. There are already abusers in Cooperstown — Bobby Cox and Kirby Puckett are two easy examples. And there are PED users already in, too — we could say that the reason for both of these things is that their inductions are from a time before anyone thought much about these issues or cared as much about them.

Does that mean that, since there are already abusers and PED users in the Hall, their modern day counterparts deserve to be in, too? Or are we thinking differently about these things as a society and a baseball community, and should our votes reflect that new reality? If that’s the case, what does it say about us that we seem to care more about the tarnishing effect that PEDs might have on a career than we do about an athlete’s history of domestic abuse? It’s easy to understand the argument that PED use has direct effects on the game itself, while intimate partner violence happens away from the field. But even still, we should consider why we care more about performance enhancing drugs than we do about the brutalization of women?

A no-tolerance policy doesn’t seem to be the answer. Erasing the contributions someone like Bonds has made to the game of baseball doesn’t make sense; the history of the game cannot be told in full without acknowledging what Bonds did for it and brought to it. Instead, there needs to be a way to recognize players as the full, flawed humans that they are — as great baseball players, worthy of recognition but also as men who used drugs to get a leg up on their competition and also perhaps as men who treated the women in their lives horribly. All of these things can be true at once.

To do that might require changing the way we look at Cooperstown — not as an honor bestowed by baseball writers that is a combination of objective criteria and subjective assessments of worthiness and the person’s character, but simply as a museum that acknowledges those people who were the best at playing the game itself.

But what of honors and celebrations like a number retirement ceremony? That kind of recognition, by its very nature, is much more subjective, more local. Some teams require that a player be in the Hall of Fame before his number can be retired, but not all do. Most teams have their own team Halls of Fame, meant to honor those it can be argued were an important players in the history of a franchise without having a career that results in Hall of Fame membership. Bonds will be the first Giant to have his number retired by the club without a Cooperstown induction, an acknowledgment of the difficulty he may continue to face on the BBWAA’s ballot.

Looked at this way, it seems more fitting for Bonds to be elected to Cooperstown, but not receive the honor of a number retirement ceremony from the Giants. If we’re looking for consistency in how we honor athletes with a history of violence against women, the precedent set by the Phillies is a good one to follow.

Last season, the Phillies canceled a night planned to honor Pete Rose after allegations that he raped a teenage girl in the 1970s. They also decided not to include a plaque to honor him on their Wall of Fame in Ashburn Alley. Unlike Bonds, Rose is Cooperstown ineligible as a result of his betting on the sport. And while the percentage of the Hall of Fame vote he has received has grown in recent years, Bonds’ PED scandal means he’s not a shoo-in. If Rose’s sexual assault of a minor was enough for the Phillies to back out of offering him honors at their park, one must wonder why Bonds’ abuse of the women in his life doesn’t meet the same criteria.

When we erase their abusive behavior from the narrative of their lives, what we’re really doing is sending the message to their victims — and to all victims — that their pain doesn’t matter because their abuser is very good at hitting a ball with a bat. So perhaps, when we choose to recognize these men in their full, complicated humanity, it leaves room to celebrate their baseball accomplishments without valorizing them or erasing their past mistakes.

Resources and References

• Drs. Kevin Beaver, Michael G. Vaughn, Matt DeLisi, and John Paul Wright, American Journal of Public Health, “Anabolic-Androgenic Steroid Use and Involvement in Violent Behavior in a Nationally Representative Sample of Young Adult Males in the United States”
• Britni de la Cretaz, The Hardball Times, MLB Turned a Blind Eye to Bobby Cox’s Domestic Abuse
• Britni de la Cretaz, The Hardball Times, Baseball Needs to Do More About Sexual Violence
• Mark Fainaru-Wada and Lance Williams, Dark Shadows: Barry Bonds, BALCO, and the Steroid Scandal That Rocked Professional Sports
• Connor Grossman, Sports Illustrated, “The Giants Are Right To Retire Barry Bonds’s Number Even if Controversy Awaits”
• Ken Hoover, SF Gate, “Sun Bonds Tells Court Barry Beat Her Often”
• Jay Jaffe, Sports Illustrated, “Despite Hall of Fame’s Wishes, Barry Bonds Is Trending Toward Induction”
• Michelle Strucke and Kate Hajjar, Cornell University Law School Social Science and Law, Battered Woman Syndrome
• National Domestic Violence Hotline, Abuse Defined
• Chuck Schilken, Philly.com, Phillies cancel Pete Rose ceremony amid allegations
• John Shea, SF Gate, “Giants retiring Barry Bonds’ jersey number: 25”
• William Weinbaum, ESPN, Baseball Hall of Fame reaffirms Pete Rose ban