Tough Love for Barry Bonds

No love for Barry Bonds, maybe because he cheated baseball.

Eight years ago, the baseball planet was going ga-ga over Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa.

They were battling to become the first to surpass Roger Maris' mark of 61 home runs in a season, ESPN and Fox were in a competitive sprint, each fighting to be the first to carry the September game at which the record was likely to be broken.

It was a delicious frenzy that was won by Fox, which televised McGwire's 62nd homer on a Tuesday night and drew a 12.9 rating, the largest for a regular-season ballgame in 16 years. The day before, ESPN showed McGwire slugging his 61st, which yielded a record baseball rating on cable.

But Bonds - the churlish personality at the center of accusations of steroid use - could not stoke a similar network fire. There has been no public jockeying to carry extra Bonds games, no saga like Hank Aaron's as he pursued Babe Ruth's home run record and omnipresent potbellied ghost.

When Bonds hit his 714th career home run in Oakland to tie Ruth, the Giants - Oakland game was one of four inter-league games covered by Fox.

It was shown to just 7 percent of the country - a segment comprising the San Francisco-Oakland, Sacramento, San Diego and Las Vegas markets.

The reasons were a hodgepodge of logistics and demand.

There was never a discussion about sending the Giants game to the entire country, as a historic telecast, because Fox was starting its season with four inter-league broadcasts.

Dan Bell, a spokesman for Fox, said the network has never carried a single national game on Saturday afternoon.

''Had there been the kind of national demand like there was for McGwire-Sosa, we might have elevated Oakland-San Francisco,'' he said.

Well that's what he says. But baseball fans and the rest of the MLB know better.

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