Never did Barry Bonds suffer fools gladly, whether his opponents or the media or the governmental foofs that spent tens of millions of dollars chasing charges they never could get to stick. He was Barry Lamar Bonds, home run king, and everyone else was a subject. Challenge him, whether with a fastball or pointed question or indictment, and he knew only one way to swing.

Good luck in Miami, Barry Bonds. (AP Photo) More

Unless retirement has mellowed Bonds – unless, frankly, it has made him patient as a monk – he, like everyone else who walks into the petri dish of palace intrigue that is the Miami Marlins organization, will be done in by its well-worn dysfunction. For there is no greater set of fools in baseball than Marlins owner Jeffrey Loria and president David Samson, and no matter how many great baseball men pervade their offices – and there are plenty – the amphisbaena atop the org chart will counteract any positives with its serial boobery.

Bonds is set to join the Marlins as a hitting coach, according to a USA Today report, and would return to the game that seven years ago forsook him because of lingering embarrassment over his steroid usage. While the stigma against PEDs hasn’t lessened significantly, baseball cannot forever blackball a mind as keen as Bonds’. If he fully understood the culture that beat down many good men before him and will continue to neuter others so long as Loria and Samson are in charge, perhaps Bonds could’ve saved himself the trouble of wondering how he took a major league job and ended up in a minor league operation.

“It’s never gonna get better,” one person with longtime ties to the organization recently told Yahoo Sports. “It’s never gonna get fixed, as long as they’re running things.”

This goes well beyond the shadiness of Loria and Samson’s lies to get public funding for their stadium or how they funneled cash from the Marlins to themselves or their refusal to spend revenue-sharing dollars on major league payroll or even the con job that turned into a fire sale. This is simple and straightforward: Their refusal to allow knowledgeable baseball people to run their baseball team inhibits whatever advantages those baseball people may otherwise bring.

Most of the issues, major league sources told Yahoo Sports, stem from the meddlesome nature of Loria and Samson, whose presence around the major league clubhouse isn’t just some irksome quirk. At one point during the 2015 season, Marlins manager Dan Jennings held a team meeting and asked the players how to improve the atmosphere around the team, according to multiple people present. The players’ top request: Keep Samson and other front-office types out of the clubhouse.

“It was like Festivus,” one source said. Marlins players were incensed that the luxurious 767 about which Samson bragged during spring training – a custom-designed airplane he told reporters would help the Marlins’ on-field performance – never materialized. They were tired of him approaching players after the game – especially after losses – to talk about their play. In the Marlins’ clubhouse, nobody is immune to the whims of Loria and Samson – not $325 million man Giancarlo Stanton, not the just-called-up minor leaguer making $500,000 and certainly not anybody on the coaching staff.

That’s what makes the arrival of Bonds and new manager Don Mattingly so curious. Mattingly is the Marlins’ 10th manager since Loria bought the team in 2003. He fired Joe Girardi and Ozzie Guillen after one season. Mike Redmond barely made it past his second season, and he’s the third-longest-tenured manager in Loria’s dozen years. Never, in Loria and Samson’s world, are the Marlins’ endemic problems due to the two constants: themselves. It’s always someone else’s fault, which led one source close to the team to quip about Mattingly: “He’s a lame duck with a four-year contract.”

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