He hits it high… he hits it deep… way deep.

So Barry Bonds is now and forevermore to be thought of as the all-time MLB home run king – at least until Alex Rodriguez or someone else breaks the record. But Bonds had other memorable moments on his way to No. 756. Here are 10 of the most notable.

May 30, 1986: Bonds makes his MLB debut in center field for the Pittsburgh Pirates, at home against the Los Angeles Dodgers. Batting leadoff, Bonds goes 0-for-5 and strikes out three times. But he also gets a walk. He’ll get another 2,500 or so after that.

May 31, 1986: Bonds gets his first major-league hit, a double off Dodgers pitcher Rick Honeycutt. Honeycutt was caught cheating six years earlier when he taped a thumbtack to his hand while pitching for the Seattle Mariners.

June 4, 1986: Bonds goes deep off Craig McMurtry of the Atlanta Braves, his first MLB dinger. The solo shot was part of a 4-for-5 night for Bonds at old Atlanta-Fulton County Stadium.

November 19, 1990: Bonds is named the National League MVP by the Baseball Writers of America Association. He’ll collect six more of those awards.

May 4, 1992: People names Bonds one of the 50 Most Beautiful People in the World. It can only go downhill from here.

Oct. 17, 1992: Game 7 of the NLCS. The Pirates are up 2-1 in the bottom of the ninth with two outs. The Braves have loaded the bases. Francisco Cabrera lines a single to left. Bonds tries to throw Sid Bream out at home plate, but Bream barely makes it in safe with the winning run as the Braves go on to the World Series.

December 8, 1992: Bonds signs as a free agent with the San Francisco Giants. The Pirates haven’t had a winning season since.

August 23, 1998: Bonds hits his 400th career home run off Kirt Ojala of the Florida Marlins to become the only player ever to hit 400 homers and steal 400 bases. Meanwhile, Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa steal the spotlight with their quest to break Roger Maris’ single-season record of 61 (no asterisk).

October 5, 2001: Bonds goes deep twice off Dodgers starter Chan Ho Park, Nos. 71 and 72 of the season, to break McGwire’s MLB record.

March 2, 2004: The San Francisco Chronicle reports that Bonds received steroids from BALCO Laboratories.

With the NFL regular season just over a month away, fantasy football hype is quickly building. Even the most insane sports fan pales in comparison to a hardcore fantasy football junkie.

Playing fantasy football can make every season fun and enjoyable, no matter how good or awful your favorite team plays. It doesn’t matter if you’re a Patriots fan or a Lions fan; every season can be meaningful thanks to fantasy football.

To get the most out of the fantasy football experience try and get into a league with as many of your friends as possible. That way when you win and completely crush your competition, you have someone meaningful to brag to instead of nine or 10 strangers you’ve never met face-to-face.

Owning a fantasy football team will change how you watch football on Sundays. Instead of watching the designated game for your region and patrolling the scoreboards to check up on your team and any bets you’ve made, you’ll also be on the lookout for the players on your team. If LaDainian Tomlinson is on your team (and hopefully he was last season), every time the scoreboard shows that the Chargers scored you’ll race to the online boxscore for the game and see if LT just netted you some points. Owning a fantasy football team makes every play of numerous games important, instead of just the final score.

So, start getting your draft cheat sheets ready and be on the look out for training camp injuries and rookie breakouts. You don’t want to be the guy who drafts Dominick Davis only to find out minutes later that his career is over, like I did last year. A bad draft won’t immediately sink your team (that’s what trades and hidden gems like Marques Colston are for), but you’ll need to work some real magic to get back to the front of the pack.

Who can forget last season’s Cinderella Story – the Detroit Tigers – who went from pretenders to contenders and almost brought a World Series title back to Motown for the first time since 1984. Things are looking good for the Tigers this season and with a little luck they could finish up on top overall. But there are a number of teams that could make a Tigers-like turnaround.

Look for the Chicago Cubs to be one of those teams.

The Cubs can’t finish any worse than they did last season (last place overall in the NL), so they have nowhere to go but up. They scored big in the free agent market during the offseason and appear to have what it takes to possibly contend in the NL Central. Alfonso Soriano and Cliff Floyd have added some much-needed power, and the Cubs have improved their rotation behind Carlos Zambrano with Ted Lilly and Jason Marquis.

Another team to watch is the defending champion St. Louis Cardinals. They’ve made further improvements to their roster by acquiring more talent at the trade deadline.

There’s also the up-and-coming Milwaukee Brewers, which has one of the best young rotations in the game. The addition of veteran Jeff Suppan along with holdovers Chris Capuano and Dave Bush does give the Brewers three reliable arms behind Sheets. Offensively the Brewers are packed with potential that includes plenty of pop.

In the AL the team to watch out for is the Cleveland Indians. Cleveland finished a disappointing fourth in the AL Central last season, but this season they should challenge the rest of the heavy hitters in the division (which includes Detroit, Minnesota and the White Sox) for the division crown. One of Cleveland’s biggest problems last year was their bullpen, which they tried to improve by adding Joe Borowski and Roberto Hernandez. The Indians have a number of heavy hitters, including Grady Sizemore, Travis Hafner and Victor Martinez, but it may all come down to the ability of Andy Marte, Jhonny Peralta and Josh Barfield as the regular season winds down.

Any professional sports league or organization that says it is against betting on sports is either a liar or a damn fool. Betting has been around longer than most sports we play today. In fact, when they were writing up the rules for baseball it wouldn’t surprise me if someone was taking over/under bets on how long it would take them to finally get every minute rule and detail down pat.

The big argument that so many sports leagues put forward against sports betting is that it can infiltrate the game and lead to another Black Sox-type scandal. For anyone that doesn’t know, the Black Sox scandal involved a scheme to throw the 1919 World Series. There have been numerous other betting scandals since, such as Pete Rose, Serie A in soccer, and the most recent Tim Donaghy scandal.

Nobody is saying that professional players, coaches, referees, etc. should be allowed to bet on the sports they’re playing or working on. The thing is though, no matter how illegal you make something it won’t prevent at least some people from doing it. Remember how successful prohibition was back in the day?

The betting scandals also show one reason why the leagues should be pushing for legal online gambling. All of these guys like Rose and Donaghy were making bets with underground bookies or even Mafia-type guys. Allowing online betting would at least separate the sports from these shady outside characters. You can never fully separate yourselves from the shady characters inside the game, but you can at least keep other external forces outside the field of play by providing solid, reliable, secure and regulated options.

The leagues could also make some more money by joining up with some online gambling sites or services. If Master Card can be the official credit card of MLB, and Speed Stick can be the official deodorant of the NHL, why can’t certain sportsbooks like WillHill or Bodog be the official sports book of the NFL? A relationship like this would be win-win for everyone involved, especially bettors, and drive interest in the games even higher than it already is.

The terms hero and professional athlete don’t seem to go together very often anymore. The classy career athletes only seem to show up these days at oldtimer events or Hall of Fame inductions that include gentlemen like Cal Ripken Jr. and Tony Gwynn, while excluding the Mark McGuire types.

The list of pro athletes that have embarrassed themselves, their teams and their sports just over the last year is a very long one. This summer alone the NFL is dealing with felony allegations against Michael Vick, the NBA is trying to distance itself from point-shaving referee Tim Donaghy, the PGA Tour has an estimated 10 steroid users according to Gary Player, and the Tour de France is still stocked more heavily with drugs than a laboratory full of test rats.

That short list doesn’t even include troublemakers like Pacman Jones, Chris Henry, the other dozen Cincinnati Bengals players who are familiar with the back of a police car, Stephen Jackson, Ron Artest, etc., etc., etc. The list is endless and seems to be getting new names faster than ever before.

So, is the problem that athletes are spoiled, overpaid cheaters and criminals, or has this kind of behavior always been going on but the media is now much more aware of it in our global village? The best answer is probably a little bit of both.

The number of athletes wrapped up in illegal activities isn’t exactly a new thing. Just look into past performers like Darryl Strawberry, Dwight Gooden, Steve Howe and Ben Johnson to see that. However, when Strawberry or Gooden were arrested it wasn’t beamed across the globe in seconds and covered by the half-dozen cable news and sports networks that dissect every move a pro athlete makes these days.

Professional athletes may make tons of cash, have the admiration of millions and play a sport for a living that normal people play just to relax; but they’re still human beings who make mistakes, and just like you and me take the easy way out most of the time. Anyone who says athletes don’t toe the line or act like they did in the ‘good old days’ might want to delve into the real Mickey Mantle, and the human frailties of Babe Ruth, and – scraping the bottom of the barrel – the character of Ty Cobb.

History tends to gloss over certain things, and in 50 years don’t be surprised if you’re telling the next generation about a time when athletes were much more civilized.