Bonds away!

Have you ever seen an entire sports network held hostage by a single player? We're seeing it now with ESPN's coverage of the Barry Bonds home run chase. Taking no chances on missing the historic homer, ESPN has decided to air every Giants game until Bonds breaks the record. It paid off somewhat Saturday night when Bonds homered in the first inning to tie Aaron's record of 755.

But there's a major downside. When Bonds isn't hitting home runs (which is just about every at bat given his recent performance) there's absolutely nothing of interest to watch. The Giants are dreadful this year and ESPN runs the risk of alienating a big chunk of viewers by force feeding them boring baseball. Not to mention the fact that the constant overexposure of Bonds has caused most fans outside of San Francisco to wish the whole thing would just go away.


Given that ESPN has a multitude of platforms it would seem to make more sense to air programming that people actually want to watch and cut in across the networks with live coverage every time Bonds comes to bat. Or does that make too much sense?