I honestly don't know how to present this, because Bucs Dugout isn't a tabloid and I don't want to give Jeff Pearlman any more attention, but wow is this a crazy thing for an employee of a Pittsburgh paper to say to a journalist, particularly one known for flinging dirt:
To this day, those who know Bonds describe him with the same harsh terminology as his teammates did back during the glorious times. Selfish, arrogant, rude, condescending, prickly and, in the purest of ways, just plain mean. As Pete Diana, the Pittsburgh Pirates' former team photographer once told me, "Personally, I hope Barry dies."
"Uh, what?" I said.
"I mean it," Diana responded. "I want Barry to die. He's that horrible."
Diana is currently a photographer for the Post-Gazette. If I were a journalist and he'd said it to me, I wouldn't have written it, but now it's in Sports Illustrated, so the cat's out of the bag. It really makes one wonder what those late-'80s Pirates clubhouses must have been like.
UPDATE: WstCstBucco points out that this quote has actually been around for a while, and Pearlman was just recycling it.