The Barry Bonds plan for dealing with the nattering nabobs who control Public Image Ltd.: Move to a place where they can't touch you.

He is doing it now, Bonds is. The man pops home runs like they were Pez from a Marge Simpson dispenser, and the home runs add up and the seasons go by, and they add up and they go by, and the next thing you know the man has swum all the way to the Isle of the Untouchables.

	Barry Bonds does not often show his warmer side on the baseball field.

Bonds is piling up the kinds of numbers that will fully command their place on the table of baseball history -- and that is a place perhaps beyond personality, beyond any in-season dust-up or psychological profile or Recalcitrant Superstar magazine piece you'd care to offer.

History in baseball is written not merely by the winners, but by the deed-doers. Which means, of course, that Barry Bonds may well be on his way to having the last word.

Six hundred home runs is the latest milestone for Bonds, but there will be others. He holds the single-season home-run record at 73, though it's impossible in this era to reliably predict how long that baby will maintain its significance. He's certainly working on some of the more dubious, how-soon-can-we-stop-discussing-this records imaginable, including most walks in a season.

But those are small potatoes. What Bonds is really doing is compiling his overall baseball resume, headed by his admittance to the four-member 600 Club, that given time will overwhelm almost everything else that is said or written about him. In his case, as with many rare-air elites, it's probably just as well.

His occasional public softening over the past two years duly noted, Bonds is a player not particularly well-liked in his career's lifetime. That he won't be recalled as the world's greatest teammate is by now a given. It is a matter of record that his feats have never carried his team to a World Series. He has probably seen two unflattering profiles brought forth for every one that could be construed as complimentary.

You want to lament or loathe Bonds, there are plenty of arrows in the quiver. Heck, the young, petulant Bonds provided half of them himself years ago.

But this, of course, is merely today, and baseball history doesn't always concern itself with what the exchange rate of the French franc was back in Joe Stud's playing day, much less the grimy details of how a player was perceived in his moment. I'll go out on a limb here and say that the Phillies' Mike Schmidt was one of the more prickly players of his generation, but ask around much beyond Philadelphia, and Schmidt is merely remembered as a great third baseman with a monster bat. That's sports history for you.

It may work in Bonds' favor, too. There's nothing criminal or scandalous attached to Bonds' permanent baseball record, no Pete Rose element to weigh him down. Being received coolly by one's peers is not, and never has been, a particularly compelling case to make before the judges of history -- and understand, when we're talking about history in sports we are talking about a mere few generations from now, not thousands of years. This is ball, not the fall of the Roman empire.

Babe Ruth was idolized publicly; privately, he was a man of some monumental failings. All of it makes him interesting. But only the part about the 714 home runs -- and the 60 hit during one astounding 154-game season -- elevates it to the big table of ongoing baseball conversation.

It is hard to sit in one place and see the future in another, and one thing is certain: Both Bonds' heroics and his foibles have been played out at a time of unprecedented scrutiny of games and their players in America. It wouldn't take you but a couple of thoughtful mouse-clicks to learn more than you could possibly want to know about Barry Bonds (or any other elite athlete, for that matter), and what such saturated coverage suggests is that every single thing will be recorded, most of it analyzed and far too much of it accorded an importance that won't resonate even 30 years down the road.

Nope, a few decades from now the generation beyond mine will speak first of the fact that a guy named Barry Bonds, that oldish gentleman trotting out to the first-base line for the legends game, piled up such incredible numbers that he put himself in the pantheon of baseball greats. And after that, they might spend some time discussing whether it was a good thing or a bad thing, and after that someone might remember that Bonds wasn't your classic All-American hero, that in some ways he emerged as an anti-hero of sorts and that, come to think of it, there was that episode that time when he and that other guy started yelling at each other and didn't really get along so hot afterwards.

And it might make for a good discussion, if it ever gets that far along. But the numbers will come first. History seems to say so.

Mark Kreidler is a columnist for the Sacramento Bee and a regular contributor at ESPN.com