He wants to break baseball’s most sacred record, and this gives him the best chance of doing it. It won’t make him a more charismatic and legendary figure than Babe Ruth or a more admired and respected one than Willie Mays. Whether he hits one more home run or 100 more, his accomplishments will always be under a cloud of suspicion and his personality will always be a black hole that sucks everything in and gives nothing back.

Some people — maybe most people — reading this column will think it’s a total rip job on Barry. It’s not. He’s already done that to himself. This is just the recap.

I actually hope he gets the record. I’ve felt that way for a long time, and I can’t say why, other than that we all have a natural desire to have been there when something great has happened. We can argue about how it was accomplished afterwards, but at least we saw it; at least we can tell the next generation that the guy we saw was better than anyone before or since, so there.

It won’t make me like him, and it doesn’t have to. No one liked Ty Cobb, but his .366 lifetime batting average is still unmatched in the history of the game and is likely to remain so. Cap Anson was a racist sob and one of the principal architects of baseball’s whites-only policy, but his 44-game hit streak is still tied for second all-time.

The record book doesn’t care about what you were but only about what you did. Bonds understands that, just as he understands that after putting this much into reaching the top line in the book, he’ll hate himself forever if he gives it away by playing for something as silly as national pride and the admiration of the fans who pay his salary.

Good. At least we won’t have to feel sorry for him if he gets injured during the season. At least we won’t have to flinch when we see his game deteriorate to a shadow of what it once was as he tries to get the last few long flies.

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There was pathos in the exit of Willie Mays as a tottering and ineffective old ballplayer with the New York Mets. Those who watched his final years felt a sadness as they watched his decline even as they felt good inside remembering the joy he had given them, a contact high from the joy Mays himself took from playing the game.

Bonds has inspired awe, but never the innocent joy that Mays did. He is a magnet not for children but for sycophants.

Why ruin all that? Or, more to the point, why would we expect him to?

He’s not this generation’s Babe Ruth or Willie Mays. He’s its Ty Cobb, a mean and spiteful player destined to be a mean and spiteful old man.

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