The face of Major League Baseball for a tumultuous period in the mid-2000s, Barry Bonds is joining Netflix in by far his most prominent post-career role.
Bonds has officially joined Netflix as an analyst for the streamer’s slate of Major League Baseball events this season, including Wednesday’s Yankees-Giants Opening Night game, the Home Run Derby in July and the Field of Dreams game in August. Andrew Marchand of The Athletic was first to report last month that Netflix was pursuing Bonds.
The all-time home run leader joins a Netflix pregame and postgame desk that includes host Elle Duncan and fellow analysts Albert Pujols and Anthony Rizzo.
It is hard to convey to those who were not paying attention at the time just how controversial a figure Bonds was at the height of his notoriety. Generations of athletes, from Muhammad Ali to LeBron James, have been subjected to invective by the media — meaning actual writers and columnists, not provocateurs on morning shows. But Bonds was different in that he gave as good as he got. The result was the kind of toxic, abrasive relationship with the media that rivaled the likes of Bob Knight.
That Bonds is now a member of the media would seem to be a contradiction, but at this point it should be no surprise that someone who clashed with the media eventually joined its ranks. (Of course, it should be noted that being a television analyst is not nearly the same thing as being a beat reporter asking questions in a press conference.)
Knight was an ESPN analyst for years, joining the company a few short years after disparaging one of its reporters, Jeremy Schaap, in a live interview. Bonds himself had an ESPN reality show titled “Bonds on Bonds” in 2006.
And the closest analogue to Bonds, Alex Rodriguez, has had a decade-plus career in television with FOX and — for a few years — ESPN. But Rodriguez never had the personality to spar with media members in the way that Bonds did.
Bonds and Rodriguez are arguably the faces of the ‘steroid era’ in baseball, generating far more scrutiny than their contemporaries, some of whom were openly celebrated just a few short years before Bonds was openly discredited. Rodriguez long ago admitted steroid use, but Bonds never did so publicly.
In that way, Bonds is similar to Pete Rose, who spent years denying he bet on baseball. But by the time Rose entered television — working with Rodriguez in the Fox Sports studio — it was a decade after he finally relented and admitted what he had done.
