Bonds ball bang, straight to the moon

"One of these days, Alice. One of these days. Bang! Zoom! To the moon!"

With that thinly-veiled threat of domestic violence, Jackie Gleason captured a nation's imagination of sending things to our closest celestial neighbor.

Now, a fashion mogul who <a href=http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/09/17/buyer-of-bonds-ball-would-send-it-into-space/index.html?hp>; recently paid more than $750,000 </a>for Barry Bonds' 756th home run ball wants to put the ball of cowhide and string permanently out of commission to make a statement about Bonds' steroids scandal.

On his Web site, Marc Ecko is <a href=http://www.vote756.com/marcecko/>;giving everyone the chance to decide what to do with the ball</a>.

Shall we preserve it in Cooperstown as is, brand it with an asterisk and then send it to Cooperstown or strap it to a rocket Wile E. Coyote-style and fly it to the moon?

Though results haven't been put up on the site yet (voting continues through next Tuesday), I think it's safe to say there aren't a whole lot of people that will want to send the ball to cooperstown unscathed.

Whether you're a Bonds fan or not, it's not difficult to see that something on Barry's body changed over the course of a few seasons, and that it probably wasn't the effects of a few more T-bone steaks and increased weight lifting.

Ecko's three ideas for the ball are great, I think. But they aren't very inventive.

If it were me, I'd probably get a big bucket of baseballs, make all of them look exactly the same as the home run ball, and send them all to Bonds. That way, there would be no possible way he'd know which is the real ball and which are the fakes. Barry would be forced to lug around a bucket of balls (much like an albatross about his neck) for the rest of his life as he moves from mansion to mansion, never knowing just which ball is the culmination of his life's work.

Or, I might just give it to him, cut into the shape, perhaps, of a big asterisk.

What would you do with the ball?