Bye-bye, Barry

Finally, it is over — and I’ve never said that before about a baseball all-star game, even when the contests weren’t that riveting. (And they usually aren’t.)

This year’s was tough to take because it turned into a Barryfest. First the jerk makes the starting lineup with a last-minute surge of votes. Huh? The guy is booed like Osama bin Laden in every visiting park he plays. The Bay area must be more populous than I thought.

And of course it was in San Fran, and Barry totally piggybacked on the location this year. If you’re talkin’ baseball in San Francisco, it was Willie Mays back then and Balco Barry now. He gets to slide into the spotlight and act like he belongs there.

If the all-star game had been in Cincinnati or Seattle, all that nonsense about Barry being worshipped as “the game’s greatest hitter” would have been squelched. Instead, fans would be talking about what they should be talking about:

Will he be indicted for perjury and/or tax evasion. … Will Bud Selig summon up the gumption to be somewhere else when No. 756 is hit? … Wouldn’t you love to see him drilled in the ribs by a fastball just on general principles?

Whatever. It’s over, and thank God he didn’t hit one into McCovey Cove. He went 0-2. The only thing that would have been better was if he had made an error or struck out swinging wildly.

But I won’t be greedy. It’s enough that he wasn’t the “hero” of this game. It’s done, and now he is headed to another third-place finish on a team that can’t win precisely because it has this highly paid slugger who drives off other talent (like Jeff Kent) with his ego and his insults.

On the other hand, it’s back to the dreaded countdown to 756. Wake me when it’s over. Meanwhile, I’m cheering for the grand jury in San Francisco.