SAN FRANCISCO – In a perfect world, the Steroid Era would have begat the Fundamental Era. More applause for a rangy fielder than a one-dimensional home run hitter, and more credit to someone who can advance a runner with a bunt than to a pull-hitting beast who doesn't know the definition of sacrifice.

Instead, there is shortstop Omar Vizquel, the embodiment of everything modern-day baseball isn't, sitting by himself in the San Francisco Giants clubhouse while a glut of people, yours truly included, watch Barry Bonds to see if he – gasp! – wiggles his big toe.

"They always have Bonds here, Bonds doing this, Bonds doing that, Bonds with the home runs," Vizquel said recently. "The biggest show in baseball now is the home run. It doesn't matter what you do on the defensive side or how many records or how many Gold Gloves you have. People like talking about the longball."

He sighed.

"They really forget about the defensive part of the game."

So, for one day at least, allow us to indulge his

CLEVELAND – There is a rather sizeable hole in the armpit of Travis Hafner's T-shirt that reads "The Animal" across the front. He's got a shaved head, an angular jaw and the kind of glower that were you to ask him about his favorite sandwich, you'd half-expect him to answer, "Knuckle."

Everything about Hafner, the Cleveland Indians' prolific designated hitter, seems to scream brute, from his WWE fixation – the aforementioned Animal, by the way, is the wrestler Batista – to the manner in which his left-handed swing punishes opposing pitchers. And then comes the answer to a rather benign question about what else Hafner enjoys.

"Chess," he says.

Uh-huh. Bet Albert Pujols spends his free time speed cubing and Jim Thome drops multiple bingos in his Scrabble games, too.

"Seriously," Hafner said. "I guess it can be like baseball. It's a cat-and-mouse game, one person trying to read the other. The pitcher tries to set you up just like someone will try to trap you. And in both cases, I try to

The most expensive gorilla suit in the world hangs in the window of Ace Ticket in Brookline, Mass.

When Jim Holzman plunked down $11,000 for it at a January charity event in Boston, he was buying publicity for his broker business, sure, but more than that, he thought it was a down payment on good karma, if such things are for sale.

"Peter Gammons was on stage," Holzman said last week, "and he said if anybody bids $5,000, he guarantees Theo will come back to the Red Sox. I was in then."

Theo is Theo Epstein, the second most famous person from Brookline – the first was named John Fitzgerald Kennedy – and he was the Boston Red Sox's general manager until Halloween last year, when he walked away from the team's offices in a King Kong costume.

For the next 80 days, Boston was paralyzed with fear that Theo was gone, and it illustrated the essence of Epstein: Not that the Red Sox hired him at 28 years old in 2002 to shepherd their franchise and not that two years later he brought them their

In William Shakespeare's version of King Lear, the title character and his daughter Cordelia die. Later adaptations of the play ended with Lear alive and Cordelia happily married, proof that no matter our cynicism, we like happy endings and that man can be redeemed in spite of his misjudgments.

All of this is to say Barry Bonds, now Babe Ruth's equal in the record books with 714 home runs, is not beyond salvage. In many ways, he is just like Lear – a classic tragic hero waiting to happen – and baseball would love nothing more than to see Bonds redeemed.

Bonds seems to fit the outline. The son of Bobby Bonds and godson of Willie Mays, he was born into baseball royalty. He was terribly talented, endowed naturally with a gift, and thus damned with a wretched flaw: hubris, or an overwhelming amount of pride. And it was that conceit, in the form of his jealousy over watching an inferior player such as Mark McGwire blast into baseball lore with his 70-home run season (so says the exposé

Rivalries, the wicked sorceresses they are, stir up something inside of us. They make us feel anger where anger probably isn't necessary. They give us shivers at the thought of the person or the company or, in Major League Baseball's case, the team.

Recognizing this, MLB concocted the idea of interleague play in 1997, over the objections of baseball purists who likewise protested the wild card two years earlier, and have seen the fruits bear particularly well in rivalries determined by proximity.

None of the cities involved in the eight rival games that kick off interleague play today are separated by more than four hours. What would have been a great game (New York vs. New York) now has city bragging rights on the line. What would have been a bore (St. Louis vs. Kansas City) now concerns a state's pride.

In the spirit of rivalries, we turn to Hollywood, where they play out regularly. The cattiest rivalry these days, of course, is between Heather Locklear and Denise Richards. They were

Fantasy Baseball: Hamel among MLB's emerging stars

MILWAUKEE – Cole Hamels swears he got the snot kicked out of him in middle school, and he says it with such conviction that it must be true, for only a brave few would confess to years spent as a punching bag. Such an admission seems a lot like a supermodel saying she was the ugly duckling as a kid, because the Hamels everyone sees now – the one who's more popular in Philadelphia than a Whiz Wit at Pat's, dates a reality star/Playboy model and looks like a surfer, tall and lean with long brown hair and dark blue eyes – does not exactly jibe with pocket-protector-wearing bully-bait.

"The guys who did it feel bad now," Hamels says. "They realize what they did. They become a better person. They learn something. I learn something. I think it got me to where I am today."

Which is here, standing in front of a locker with a bright blue Philadelphia Phillies jersey adorned with his No. 35 and in front of a clubhouse replete with believers.

Before we get to your thoughts on Barry Bonds and women in baseball, allow us to relay a few letters we got in response to the story about Chad Carroll.

FAN LOYALTY ("Relief for a Royal pain," May 5, 2006)

Carroll was the Kansas City Royals fan who auctioned off his baseball loyalty on eBay. His friends won the auction because my boss was too chintzy to let me bid above $200, and the winner of their annual poker tournament gets to pick Carroll's team. Unless Carroll wins, in which case he agreed to give Yahoo! Sports readers the chance.

So far, we've gotten more than 500 emails at pickchadsteam@yahoo.com, and before the poker game in late July, I hope we can get plenty more. All 30 teams were represented in the first round of emails, giving us the scoop of the century: Devil Rays fans actually exist.

Seriously, though, we'd love to hear why Chad should pick your team, with extra points going to the most passionate and funniest. Here's a sampling:

Chad, the choice is clear: You must

SAN FRANCISCO – Since Barry Bonds is sure to take a public flogging for almost hitting into a double play when he failed to run out a pop-up, I will refrain from ripping him for the act itself. Surely Bonds knows what he did was wrong, much like the 3-year-old who chucks silverware across the dinner table.

Difference is, children have parents who dole out punishment and make the kid apologize and, hopefully, learn from the mistake. Barry Bonds, the biggest child in baseball, doesn't seem to care, and he has done such a magnificent job of shielding himself from everybody except the yes-men and stooges in his employ, he no longer understands the meaning of accountability.

To his teammates.

To his manager.

To his fans.

To baseball.

To himself.

Surely all of Bonds' slights are borne from a self-centeredness that seems to have been rubbed with a dab of the Cream. Not that Bonds ever has been a great teammate or an easy player to manage or a peach to the fans who pay to see him or a man the