Card Corner--Bobby Bonds

Bobby Bonds--Topps Company--1973 (No. 145)

A number of players have been compared to Willie Mays over the past 40 years--Eric Davis, the late Glenn Burke, and Cesar Cedeno are just three that come to mind--but only one has ever played on the same team with the "Say Hey Kid" while having to deal with the burden of unfair comparisons. In the late 1960s and the early 1970s, Bobby Bonds not only played next to Mays in the San Francisco Giants' outfield but also displayed such an immediate combination of athleticism, pure power, and baseball instincts that some fans were convinced they were watching the new Mays and the old Mays at the same time. (I love the 1973 Topps card of Bonds, which is pictured here, partly because it shows the athletic outfielder trying to elude a rundown and in part because the card features a cameo of personal favorite Willie Stargell, who was playing first base for the Pittsburgh Pirates at the time.)

And yet, by 1975, both the "old" Mays and the "new" Mays had left the Bay Area; Mays was traded to the Mets and then retired after a dismal 1973 World Series, while Bonds joined the other New York team in a straight-up swap for the talented but athletically inferior Bobby Murcer. Bonds slugged .512 in his lone season with the Yankees (while playing in the pitcher's haven of Shea Stadium), but he could never make people forget the more popular Murcer and soon became an Angel, in exchange for the uncelebrated package of Mickey Rivers and Ed Figueroa. From there, Bonds hurt his hand and bounced from club to club, raising questions with his fast lifestyle. On the field, his critics said he struck out too much, didn't run out routine ground balls, and couldn't hit the cut-off man. Ever a threat to hit 30 home runs and steal 30 bases, he remained productive but enigmatic, never quite living up to the foreshadowing of superstardom and always giving teams reasons to move him on to another destination.

Bonds died during the summer of 2003, the victim of lung cancer that very possibly had been brought upon by years of cigarette smoking. When I learned about Bonds' death five years ago, a thought came to me: we're starting to hear about an increasing number of players from that era (the late sixties and seventies) who have been hit with lung cancer, the likely result of a culture that too readily accepted cigarettes, in part because they didn't have the volume of medical information that we have today. Mark Belanger, a persistent smoker, died from lung cancer. John Milner, also a heavy smoker, died from the same kind of cancer. And in the fall of 2003, Dave McNally (one of Belanger's teammates in Baltimore) succumbed to lung cancer.

These tragic developments should serve as a reminder to us that each era in baseball has had its vices, specifically its problems with drugs. As much consternation as the use of steroids has created in the new millennium, the cigarette smoking of the 1960s and seventies has begun to inflict its own toll. There is another similarity between the use of steroids in the current day and the heavy smoking of years past. We don't yet know the full long-term effects of steroids today, just as many of the players of the sixties didn't understand the havoc that cigarettes would cause to their bodies in their later years.