Bonds looking for a job? Now that's a reality show

	Barry Bonds seems willing to go with a one-year deal worth around $18 million, roughly the slugger's salary last season in San Francisco. Chuck Solomon/SI
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LAKE BUENA VISTA, Fla. -- So this is what it has come to for one of the greatest sluggers that baseball has ever seen: Barry Bonds, the man who would be Home Run King, the most recognizable face in the game today, is scrambling for a job.

This, you have to figure, would make one heck of a reality show some day.

On Wednesday, Bonds breezed through a hotel lobby at baseball's annual winter meetings, just another job seeker in a place filled to the gills with them.

The seekers usually are twentysomethings pining to get a foot in the front-office door, out-of-work announcers seeking their next gig or grizzled scouts looking to hook on with another team. They're not a bald, bulging, often sulking hitter on the verge of snapping baseball's home run record.

But in the long history of the game, there's never been anyone quite in Bonds' predicament.

Bonds ostensibly came to this Disney World resort to meet with the Giants, his employers since 1993, and maybe to chat up some teams interested in signing him to a lucrative contract next year. The other teams, if you believe Bonds' agent, Jeff Borris, are crawling all over Bonds, throwing all kinds of money at him.

Who, Borris asks, wouldn't want Barry?

But if you believe what real evidence we have, Bonds was here desperately trying to convince the Giants -- no player comes here in the first place except out of sheer desperation -- to come up with a little more dough for one more year of swatting fly balls into McCovey Cove. Short of that, he might have been trying to make nice with some other teams, just in case the Giants don't budge.

"Maybe," suggested an American League general manager, "he's trying to break down some barriers."

And short of convincing some other team that he's worth what he wants?

Well, that's where things get interesting.

If Bonds can't get at least one other suitor to offer him a contract he can live with -- and, by all indications, he left here to return to his Los Angeles home just hours after arriving in Florida, barely enough time to meet with his own team -- we'll soon find out how low Barry is willing to stoop to crank out those final 22 home runs that would break Hank Aaron's record.

This much is clear; even in a winter of practically unprecedented generosity -- Ted Lilly gets $40 million? -- from team owners: Bonds doesn't yet have an offer he likes, from any team.

And this much is looking to be increasingly likely: he probably won't get one.