Love Me, Hate Me: Barry Bonds and the Making of an Antihero (review)

As its subtitle asserts, Jeff Pearlman's Love Me, Hate Me proposes to discover, through an in-depth investigation into the slugger's background, what forces contributed to the creation of a baseball antihero. In literary terms, an antihero is a self-styled social outcast or rebel with whom readers tend to identify but who lacks the traditional attributes, physical prowess among them, generally associated with heroes such as Achilles or Ivanhoe. Rather than painting a portrait of baseball's answer to Holden Caulfield, Yossarian, or Randall Patrick McMurphy, Pearlman's Barry Bonds more closely resembles a villain, the likes of whom professional wrestling impresario Vince McMahon would be proud.

The tone for this profile is set in the prologue. Here, Pearlman notes that, first and foremost, Bonds is not to be trusted, providing readers with the invaluable information that Bonds failed at knot tying while in the Cub Scouts, but, because his father was a famous ballplayer and a local hero, young Barry was the beneficiary of social promotion. Bonds had the audacity to tell Pearlman that, in fact, he never was a Cub Scout. So goes Love Me, Hate Me. According to Pearlman, on the way to becoming the single-season home run record holder, Bonds, son of a talented, but deeply flawed and extremely demanding alcoholic father, stepped on or over everyone in his way. Fortunately, Bonds seems to have stopped short of kicking puppies, or at least evaded the notice of his fourth-grade teacher, a high school teammate, and a host of similar informants, while doing so.

As Pearlman, a former writer for Sports Illustrated and Newsday, tells Bonds, "I've interviewed everyone. Five hundred people," to write this profile (3). Most of his informants, however, seem to have been ancillary figures in Bonds's life. The meat of this profile, particularly when it comes to the details of Bonds's professional career and his alleged abuse of performance-enhancing drugs, comes from secondary sources. Certainly, Pearlman would have been remiss had he not referred to the work of Mark Fainaru-Wada and Lance Williams, the San Francisco Chronicle writers who broke the BALCO story by publishing leaked grand jury testimony. But he adds nothing new, simply reiterating what has already been said and, by now, is well known.

No matter what sources he relies upon, one thing is clear: Pearlman regards his subject with the utmost contempt. Even when discussing Bonds's laudable successes on the field, Pearlman is excessively mean-spirited and unwilling to give credit where credit is due. Writing of the slugger's quest to become only the second player in Major League history to hit 40 home runs and steal 40 bases in the same season, Pearlman calls the feat a "statistical fraud in motion," only to retract the statement, saying, "Okay, maybe 'fraud' is too strong. Statistical indecency" (175). In Pearlman's eyes, Bonds's attempt to wrest something positive from a 96-loss season borders on scandalous. The notion that paying fans may have had some interest in Bonds's quest to succeed in this regard does not even cross the author's mind. Indicative of Pearlman's dislike for Bonds is the author's unwillingness to accept that his subject might have actually done something positive, going as far as to suggest that Bonds could not possibly have been upset by the attacks of September 11, 2001, and must have been faking when he seemed to be disturbed by the event.

The stated purpose of Love Me, Hate Me is to explain exactly why Bonds, a ballplayer of prodigious talent even without the benefit of performance-enhancing drugs, became a BALCO customer. At various points, Pearlman does seem to offer an explanation for Bonds's selfish quest for personal glory, suggesting that what drives Bonds is baseball's version of the "anxiety of influence": he is compelled to succeed in order to please, and...