Making their pitch
	Throughout the World Series, ESPN.com will have two of its writers go head-to-head on a variety of topics. Today's question: Who is more fun to watch: Barry Bonds or David Eckstein? Ray Ratto says it has to be Barry and his blasts, but Sean McAdam argues that he'll go with the Everyman, Eckstein.

David Eckstein's many charms are evident to anyone who pays even the remotest attention to baseball --- even the poor sap who couldn't see much difference between him and Mark Loretta.

And never mind looking up Mark Loretta. This isn't about him, and he doesn't deserve being dragged into this gruesome little tableau.

No, this is about whether one should prefer Eckstein to Barry Bonds, and the answer to that one is elemental.

I'll take the bigger-than-life, haughty, athletically dismissive left fielder. You take the cute, engaging but tough-as-sandpaper-in-your-shorts shortstop. In fact, you take the field and we'll call it even.

You've been getting steady tastes of Eckstein for a full year now. He dives in the dirt to stop ground balls. He bunts. He runs. He makes the game go faster, and anyone who watches the sluggard's pace of postseason baseball needs all the fast he or she can get.

On the other hand, there's Bonds, and we'll just take Game 2 of the World series as proof.

The Angels won the game, 11-10, but it used to be 11-9 before Bonds got his mitts on it. He turned on a Troy Percival fastball in the ninth inning and hit it so hard that he caused Tim Salmon, the game's actual hero, to turn into a drooling bystander.

It ended up 20 rows into the right field seats, causing Salmon to mime to an international audience, "That's the hardest ball I've ever seen hit." It did not cause the Giants to win the game, for Bonds is no more qualified to hit a bases-empty two-run homer than Mark Loretta, but he did cause the fans leaving Edison Field to acknowledge that everything they've heard about the man is true, plus about 30 feet.

So he changes the way the game is watched. He also changes the way the game is played for similar reasons. The proof? Ball one, ball two, strike one, ball three, ball four . . . and occasionally omit the third pitch. He provides a level of fear in the game that Eckstein cannot, because Eckstein's specialty is not awe, but annoyance.

Bonds is bigger than bigger than life, because he makes cowardice seem not only prudent, but the height of wisdom. Eckstein makes the other team play harder, but less effectively because they aren't sure how hard he will squeeze. Bonds makes the other team play softer, because he demands that you give in to him and deal with the rest of the lineup under less advantageous circumstances.

Why, they'd be almost perfect together, if they weren't so perfect where they are.

Eckstein and Bonds both give their teams their personalities, because their own personalities are so different. There is an air of creative tension that orbits Giants World, in part because of Bonds. He tests our egalitarian impulses because he demands so much space. Eckstein, on the other hand, barely takes up any space at all.

And therein lies the best reason to prefer Bonds. Without him, Eckstein wouldn't have the point of contrast required to show him as a special player. He'd just be another short guy working at the forgotten fringes of the game -- old school in a new school world.

Bonds, on the other hand, puts the face to "big," and even in baseball, one of the last sports that can make fine use of "not big," big is still better. One size doesn't fit all, and Eckstein covers in increments what Bonds handles in one sitting. Bonds is, in short, the phenomenon to end all phenomena, an entire inning with feet.

If David Eckstein can do that, good on his father. Until then, though, we'll go with the big, proven commodity. Because he's big. Because he's proven. Because commodities like this don't turn up at Costco as a seasonal best buy.

Ray Ratto is a columnist with the San Francisco Chronicle and a regular contributor to ESPN.com