Bonds nears record after two Wrigley homers

CHICAGO — No, that wasn't a ceremonial trip to the All-Star Game for Barry Bonds. The guy still can hit. No doubt about that.

In what might have been his last appearance at Wrigley Field, the 42-year-old Bonds showed his powerful wrists and fighter-pilot eyes are still a match for anything baseball can throw him, including a wind blowing in off Lake Michigan.

Stuck in an 0-for-21 slump and battling sore legs, Bonds had been reduced to a pinch-hit role for the first three games of San Francisco's four-game series against the Cubs. He got back in the lineup Thursday and gave a jeering crowd of 40,198 something to remember him by, hitting his 752nd and 753rd career home runs off left-handers Ted Lilly and Will Ohman.

That leaves Bonds needing only two homers to match Hank Aaron's career record. He could get there this weekend at Miller Park in Milwaukee, which was erected just beyond the outfield fence at County Stadium, where Aaron played for 14 seasons, 12 with the Braves and his last two as a designated hitter for the Brewers.

Commissioner Bud Selig, who runs Major League Baseball from an office in downtown Milwaukee, ought to stop by for a game or two but most likely will be conspicuously absent.

Selig has been wrestling with the decision of whether to lend his presence to a celebration of Bonds' pursuit of the home-run record, which is being conducted in the wake of revelations that tie Bonds to steroid use.

While Bonds has said he has great admiration for Aaron, he sees no particular significance in gunning for the record in Aaron's old neighborhood.

"It doesn't mean anything different than anywhere else," Bonds said Thursday afternoon, sitting amid a pack of reporters in the visitors' dugout. "I feel good. My body feels great. I feel rejuvenated a little bit. ... Wherever it happens, it happens."

Cubs manager Lou Piniella and others refer to Aaron's 755 homers as "the most hallowed record in sports," but Bonds has tried to downplay the magnitude of his climb up a mountain where only the Hammer had gone before him.

He has tried to keep his production tied mainly to the context of helping the Giants win, but they are a sad old bunch, losing seven of the past eight times he has hit a home run.

So now this officially has become The Barry Bonds Show, and will be until he hits his next three homers.

"Yeah, it's real," Bonds said. "I had to get over them switching the baseballs [to authenticate home-run balls]. Any time that happens, I go into a slump. ... They're switching the baseballs, so you know something is happening."

Bonds was 3 for 3 with a walk and six RBI Thursday, yet the Giants never could recover from a series of fielding mistakes that allowed the Cubs to take a 4-0 lead in the first inning and keep scoring.

"It's hard to play as badly as we played today," said manager Bruce Bochy, whose team has lost seven of its past eight. "That first inning, the ball was going everywhere. You hate to see that happen on a major-league field, but it did happen."

Bonds retaliated with a majestic leadoff homer on a Lilly fastball in the second inning, driving the ball over the right-field bleachers and onto Sheffield Avenue. He delivered a two-run single to left-center in the third inning, took a six-pitch walk from rookie Billy Petrick in the sixth and gained a serious bit of revenge on Ohman in the seventh.

The Cubs left-handed reliever got Bonds to line out on a 3-2 fastball Tuesday night, when Bochy used him as a pinch hitter, but this time threw a 3-2 fastball that Bonds obliterated.