MIAMI — In baseball, as in life, few attributes are as hard to create — or defend — as a reputation. Barry Bonds is beyond trying anyway. He entered a Marlins Park suite Saturday at the start of spring training, with everything ahead of him for once, with a new thought.
MIAMI — In baseball, as in life, few attributes are as hard to create — or defend — as a reputation. Barry Bonds is beyond trying anyway. He entered a Marlins Park suite Saturday at the start of spring training, with everything ahead of him for once, with a new thought.
“Good to be here,” he said.
He was talking here with the Marlins, or maybe here at the Marlins FanFest event, or maybe even at this scheduled talk with the media. But it also fit with the idea of his returning to baseball, at 51, as the Marlins hitting coach, after eight years away.
No one knows where this goes, or how well it works. Not even Bonds, who has never coached, but related this return as a natural step, because, “Hitting is what I do — it’s what I did. Baseball is what I love. It’s been my life since I was a little boy with my father and Willie (Mays).”
This makes sense as a worthy experiment, though. If sports has any lesson about coaches, it’s simply this: There’s no predicting the good ones. Top candidates bust. Bad players are great coaches. And sometimes great players are successful coaches, too.
New Marlins manager Don Mattingly, a six-time All-Star himself, sat beside Bonds on Saturday. Mattingly made an opening statement about the hiring of Bonds, about how it was owner Jeffrey Loria’s idea, but after they met, “I just wanted to make sure Barry knew how much time was involved in coaching,” he said.
That’s one question for Bonds. There are others. He knows how to hit, but can he teach how? Will he work with players better than his reputation had him working with teammates? How will he get along with Mattingly, much less assistant hitting coach Frank Menechino?
Relationships, you see, matter in ways they didn’t have to for him as a player. Trust, too. The Marlins found that out last year, as the echoes of Dan Jennings’ odd managerial reign still reverberated Saturday.
“Now we don’t have to worry about the manager,” veteran third baseman Martin Prado said. “We got a manager and a bench coach that know what they’re doing.”
The players, of course, know all of Bonds, the player. Giancarlo Stanton says he fought with his brother over Bonds’ rookie baseball card. Jose Fernandez says he wants to pitch against Bonds, just to say he did it.
But Bonds, the coach? Bonds, the person? And Bonds’ famous ego?
“I hope they don’t think they know more than me, because they don’t,” he said at one point of Marlins players, punctuating the idea with a healthy laugh.
If Saturday’s words are lasting, Bonds will enjoy being in baseball — “I missed being in the fire,” he said — and there’s no reason for him not to be. His PED issues as a player? The likes of Matt Williams and Mark McGwire did that years ago.
The only issue is whether he can coach. He talked of getting to know players in spring training, and of helping players who underachieved last year in having the second-to-last run total in the majors.
He knows his boundaries, as when asked what he’ll do for 42-year-old Ichiro Suzuki. “When you’re that close to 3,000 hits, what do you want me to say?” Bonds said. “All I need to say is, ‘Ichiro, what kind of massage do you want?’ “
As for the others …
“I know what will work for them,” Bonds said “But they have to put the time in and the work in. This isn’t something that happens overnight. This takes time. I mastered my craft over 22 years.
“It didn’t happen in one day. I had thousands of talks with my father (Bobby Bonds), thousands of talks with Willie, and they still had to tweak me. But these guys are professionals. There’s such a small group of people that can do this.
“They’re already talented within themselves. I don’t need to write a book for them. We need to nurture them in a way to bring out their own personal abilities. That’s what my job is to do.”
The last hitting coach Loria hired with no experience was former Yankee Tino Martinez. He didn’t last a season. So you never know where this goes. All you know is for a man supposedly so unhappy with baseball years ago, he sounds happy to be back.