It seems impossible that the return to the field of a four-time defending MVP could be so basically irrelevant as Barry Bonds’s was last night, but so it was. Bonds no longer has any direct relation to the game of Albert Pujols and Alex Rodriguez; he’s a relic, a sideshow, a brief diversion. Such is the fate of an old ballplayer on a bad team, which is all that Bonds is now.

He will probably put up absurd statistics over the three weeks remaining in the season, and will even probably go on to break Hank Aaron’s career home run record in 2007, assuming the knee infection that cost him this season doesn’t abruptly rob him of his abilities, as a similar injury did the once-great Dale Murphy. No longer, though, is he larger than the game itself.

Convenient as it would be to draw a line between Bonds’s alternately defiant and villainous behavior – fighting with a teammate, claiming the press was persecuting him by reporting on his outlandish behavior, maintaining that he mistook steroids for flaxseed oil – and his sudden loss of stature, the one really has nothing to do with the other. Bonds has been pretty nasty in public for a long time, and it’s been years since people started noticing his magically inflated head. If a surly disposition or strong suspicions of drug use were going to diminish him, they would have done so before this year.

Instead, Bonds’s sudden irrelevance has to do with how he has, by missing more than five months of the season, reached the point in his career where it is now somewhat surprising that he’s even in the major leagues. It’s rather more like being Jamie Moyer than like being Randy Johnson. For the first time in his career, the invincible and perennial champion now faces doubt and suspicion about his ability, and is visibly playing on borrowed time.

When a player is beloved or universally respected, this is a crowning period of his career. Everyone knows that Mike Piazza is about to embark on the Willie Mays-as-a-Met phase of his career, but he’s rightly been cheered all season long, given spontaneous standing ovations and shows of appreciation. When Tony Gwynn was reduced by age and weight to coming off the bench once a game to slap singles, he was still treated with due reverence. You can come up with your own examples; it’s a long-standing tendency in the game.

Unlike Piazza or Gwynn or Greg Maddux, Bonds has never made any concessions to the public, never given any sense that he played the game for anyone other than himself and his teammates and family, or for any other reason than that it would have been unthinkable for someone of his gifts not to play at the sustained height of his abilities. There’s something admirable in this; Bonds is not a phony or a hypocrite, unlike many of his peers.

But there’s also no particular reason to care about him or what he’s doing unless he’s doing something extraordinary. The most likely scenario is that he’ll play well, but no longer at a historically unprecedented level, for a horrible team. No one need pay him much mind until he comes up on Aaron’s record, assuming he doesn’t do something preposterously stupid between now and then, like beat up a teammate in view of cameras or smear himself with “the clear” in the batter’s box.

Those who dislike Bonds should applaud. There could be few crueler fates for a player so driven to make his mark on history than to lose his role at the center of the game just as he’s nearing his crowning successes. And those who love the game should applaud as well. Baseball should not revolve around one player, and if it must, it should be one more gracious and admirable.

It does seem a loss that Bonds can’t fulfill his natural role as a kindly, benevolent elder of the game. Ultimately, though, it’s a sign of the game’s health, its ability to accommodate idiosyncrasy, and the unwillingness (or inability) of the game’s power brokers to force athletes to grin, shuck, and jive.

I think Bonds’s claims that his poor manners have to do with baseball’s historical treatment of the great black players to be mostly self-glorying balderdash, but you do wonder what Willie Mays or Hank Aaron would have had to say in the early ’70s had they lived in a culture more like ours than theirs. Might they have been angry about being dropped like worn mules by the Giants and Brewers? Spoken out against being asked to be smiling role models even when their knees were killing them and they’d been on the road for two weeks? Against the way the press treats outspoken black athletes? Who knows? Had they behaved the way Bonds does, no one would have paid those complaints, or them, any mind as they got up there in years – but then that might not have mattered much anyway.