IBB (Involving Barry Bonds)

The latest baseball debate doing the rounds is the one regarding the ridiculously high number of intentional walks that Barry Bonds is drawing this year. The question being asked is: should we change the rules of baseball in order to limit the number of times a player can be intentionally walked?

ESPN's Jayson Stark suggests five different ways of altering the rules, some feasible, some less so, but Only Baseball Matters points out that all of the proposed solutions rely on being able to clearly define the difference between an unintentional walk and an intentional one (not the 'four pitches lobbed into the opposite batters' box' kind, but the 'just missed the outside corner four times' kind), and has an interesting debate on alternative solutions to the problem.

My own reaction to the problem is a very simplistic one - why are we talking about adapting the rules to suit one player (yes, just one player, because, despite what everyone says, if Barry Bonds were taken out of the equation, we wouldn't be having this debate at all)? Shouldn't the onus be on, say, the Giants to provide at least some semblance of offensive support which would make walking Bonds a less attractive proposition? El Lefty Malo points out that maybe Giants' catcher A.J. Pierzynski - quoted in Stark's article - hits the nail on the head:

"There is no solution to the problem," said [...] Pierzynski, one of the guys who has had the thrill of hitting behind Bonds this year, "except for me and Fonzy (Edgardo Alfonzo) and (Pedro) Feliz to hit -- and hit well."