you for winning the Powerball
lottery. Odds are it will be a
police dispatcher, a hospital ER or somebody close who needs to be bailed out, sent money to, or who was just T-boned by an
uninsured drunk.
If the phones of newspaper and TV sports departments and cells of baseball writers in the Eastern time zone didn't ring in yesterday's wee hours, you knew it was Barry Bonds.
San Francisco Giants owner Peter Magowan has sold enough groceries through his Safeway chain of supermarkets to know that you don't haul away the spoiled merchandise during store hours. No, the trucks
rumble to the loading bays
behind the stores and truck away the garbage-to-be in the Robert Irsay hours of the night.
But it was high noon in 1992 when the Giants' new, bail-out owner, the chairman of Safeway, made two announcements that rocked baseball. First, he had signed free-agent outfielder
Barry Bonds to the largest
contract in baseball history.
This was heady stuff for fans of
a franchise whose owner, Bob Lurie, had become Major League Baseball's biggest embarrassment. Lurie had become a joke of an owner who had a $115 million offer in hand to sell the Giants to a Tampa Bay group.
Magowan rounded up an investor group and pledged to keep the Giants in San Francisco. Lurie swallowed hard and accepted their $100 million offer. Leonard Tose must have had the same
inside-straight feeling when Norman Braman rescued his Eagles from a fate named Phoenix.
Signing Bonds was stunning, field-level news. But Magowan's second announcement rocked the Lords of Baseball to their very tax writeoffs. Pete said he didn't need the help of taxpayers adamantly opposed to funding
a new park to replace "Stick Park," where the wind had blown out the Candle a half century before. Magowan said by
financing the new stadium, "The days of putting a gun to the heads of a city and saying, 'Build a stadium or I'll move' are over."
That message apparently was diverted before it reached the Pennsylvania taxpayers who helped fund PNC Park in Pittsburgh and our own beloved
Citizens Bank Park.
It worked out well for Magowan. His ballpark, with panoramic views of the Bay Bridge, the bay and the Embarcadero waterfront, is the most scenic venue
in sports. It has hosted a World Series and, until his name was closely linked to the pharma-
villains of BALCO and the murky world of juicing, Bonds has performed historic slugging deeds. He was not only the straw that stirred the drink, he allegedly might have been the guy who gulped it down.
But now he is little more than an intensely dislikable, hanging-on caricature of himself within easy striking distance of the
