Lead Fox Sports announcer Joe Buck commented that fans used to chant Barry “for someone else around here.” Tim McCarver responded, "When Barry Manilow was here at concerts." People assumed afterward that McCarver had experienced a senior moment of some kind or was just a bit out to lunch.
I don’t buy it. I believe McCarver’s chuckle, which you can hear immediately after his Manilow line, tells a different story. He was actually making a poorly executed joke about the invisibility of Barry Bonds and at the expense of Barry Bonds. There is a delight that the baseball cognoscenti takes in making Barry Bonds their “invisible man.” It’s a way to marginalize him without confronting what he represents. He’s a home-run king in exile. He’s the end-product of an era where owners made billions selling a steroid-enhanced product. He’s the person who can no longer tell the press to go to hell, because they won’t acknowledge his voice. The press corps once asked Bonds if he thought steroids was cheating. Bonds responded, “Is steroids cheating? You want to define cheating in America? When they make a shirt in Korea for a $1.50 and sell it here for 500 bucks. And you ask me what cheating means?” Now they don't have to care what he thinks. Now they can humiliate him forever by denying his existence.
Read More | "'It's Bonds. Barry Bonds': The Return of Baseball's Invisible Man" | Dave Zirin | ?The Nation