Owners can't afford residual cost of Bonds

The Tigers lost again last night. Scored only one run. Gary Sheffield's hitting .202. That means only one thing.

Another round of "The Tigers could use Barry Bonds."

NBA owner Gavin Maloof likes Barry Bonds. MLB owners? Not so much. (Getty Images)

Well, yes, of course they could. Most every team could use Barry Bonds. But, and this is the but we've been trying to point to you, you're right enough to miss the point entirely. When you think that a team could use Barry Bonds, you're forgetting why he is not playing. What you need to figure out is whether an owner could use Barry Bonds, and an owner's criteria are different.

And though we've lined them up for you often, we're just going to have to do it again.

• Can he really make me enough money to offset his salary?

• Can he please me enough to offset the ridicule I will get in the community?

• Can I put up with the scorn from my fellow owners?

So please stop bringing up the "He hit 26 homers last year, and his OPS was ..." because that isn't the template you should be using here. This isn't about the baseball, and every time you raise the argument, you miss the argument completely.

The Players Association just raised the issue of Bonds again this week, and it should. That's what unions are for, and even though Bonds wasn't exactly what you'd call a model union man, that isn't relevant. Unions fight the fights they're supposed to fight for everyone, not just the ones who pay their dues, attend the meetings and do their picket shifts faithfully.

And perhaps the owners did gather somewhere and took a sacred oath by putting their hands over a candle flame, G. Gordon Liddy-style (kids, ask your parents), that Bonds isn't coming back, ever. I wouldn't put that kind of stupidity past them. In fact, the rule of thumb is that you should never put any kind of stupidity past any owner in any sport, just to be safe.

But there are two kinds of collusion -- standard, run-of-the-mill collusion, and collusion that can be proven in a courtroom. So while it is possible, and maybe even likely that Bonds is being held out of the game as a concerted decision by the group, one has to think that one of them said, "OK, kids, destroy the paperwork."

And there is also the possibility that they didn't have to have the meeting at all, that 29 self-absorbed rich folks who saw how Peter Magowan was pounded in the prints for all the allowances he granted Bonds, the legal trouble he courted in doing so (Greg Anderson in the clubhouse) and the urgency with which he tried to leave Bonds behind this spring and said, "You know, he doesn't have enough home runs in him to overcome that."

Self-serving? Yup. Bad for the ball team? In many cases, yes, although Bonds really isn't a need item for every team.