ANAHEIM, Calif. -- Jarrod Washburn couldn't stop him. And those 40,000 red CheerStix inflicting permanent eardrum damage couldn't stop him.

That 17-year wait to get here couldn't stop him. Those ghosts of postseason pasts couldn't stop him.

And the famous, omnipotent Rally Monkey? Sheez. Wasn't even warmed up yet.

So you can tell your grandchildren that on his first at-bat, his second swing and the fourth pitch ever thrown to him in a World Series, Barry Bonds reminded the western hemisphere why we spent every waking moment of the last five days talking about him.

	Barry Bonds became the 26th player to hit a home run in his first World Series at-bat.

It was a 2-and-1 fastball, if you're charting pitches at home. It was supposed to be down and away. Instead, it floated back toward the inner half of home plate. And from the moment he let that maple bat uncoil, you could feel him sucking all the noise, all the oxygen, all the normalcy out of Edison Field.

The baseball climbed through the night like a 767 bound for LAX. Would it land on Runway B? Would it land in Oregon? Would it blow out a few computers in the right-field press box? Would it clatter off the Memorial Care Medical Centers billboard out there beyond the fence?

No, it just disappeared down a grounds-crew tunnel off in the distance, 418 feet from where he stood. That's all. So how come, watching it, it was hard to breathe for a few seconds?

The man who hit it dropped his bat, watched it fly and then began his 51st jog around the bases this year. But the man who gave it up had a look that could almost be described as a grin, if you didn't know better.

Asked to describe that look many hours later, after the Angels' 4-3 loss to the Giants in this World Series opener, Washburn "grinned" again. Or whatever it was he did.

"I was just standing there," Washburn said, "going, 'Yeah, I guess he is good.' "

Yeah, we guess he is. So good you sometimes suspect he's just toying with all the rest of the poor regular humans he has to play against.

You can't measure greatness by what a man does in the first World Series at-bat of his life. Or else Barry Bonds' name wouldn't have joined the likes of Bill Bathe, Joe Harris and George Watkins on the prestigious Home Run In Their First World Series At-Bat list Saturday night.

But there was something about that home run that seemed to be the perfect way for the San Francisco Giants to launch this All Barry, All The Time World Series.

Oh, J.T. Snow got to play, too. And Reggie Sanders. And Jason Schmidt. And Felix Rodriguez, Tim Worrell and Robb Nen, wearing their three-headed bullpen monster suit again.

The Giants never would have won without any of them. They know it. We know it. The Angels know it. Several native tribes in Bolivia even are believed to be aware of it.

But all of us also know this: What makes this World Series the compelling, occasionally mesmerizing event it's now capable of being is just that one man.

Barry.

It's his stage. Even the Rally Monkey needs to thank him for letting everyone else play on it for the next week.

"He takes a lot of pressure off the rest of us," said Worrell. "Everything is Barry, all the time. Look what they showed on TV when we won (the LCS). They showed Barry running in. They didn't even show the rest of us. But we don't mind. Keep doing that. The more they zero in on him, there ain't no pressure on us."

	“	That was a great moment for him -- and a great moment for us. ”
		— Rich Aurilia, Giants shortstop, on Barry Bonds' home run

And the funny thing is, all of a sudden, it's as if there's no pressure on him, either. How'd that happen, anyway? Ten years of Barry-Never-Does-It-In-October talk abruptly disappears. Vanishes. Can't be found. Kind of like Yakof Smirnoff.

It's evaporated in the heat of Bonds' five-homer, 11-RBI, 15-walk, .528-on-base-percentage postseason -- a postseason that has apparently rendered all previous conversation about the .196, one-homer, six-RBI, .316-on-base-percentage portion of his postseason career about as defunct as the buffalo nickel.

"Barry Bonds is a totally different player the past two years than he was at any other time in his career," said his teammate, Rich Aurilia. "For him to do that, hit that home run, was it a surprise? No. Did it make us happy? Yeah. There was all that talk before the Series -- pitch to him or not pitch to him. It's all we heard. Well, they pitched to him tonight, and they got beat. You can't always pitch around him."

No, but it's moments like this one that make that seem like a stupendously attractive idea.

After Bonds pounded that game-tying three-run homer in Game 3 of the NLCS, the Cardinals dodged him for the next two days as if he were trying to serve them with a subpoena. That one swing, that one fly ball caught by a kayak sailor, reverberated through the rest of the series -- "and we didn't even win that game," Worrell laughed.

So you have to wonder now: Will this one reverberate for yet another week?

"I don't care if he hit a home run or struck out right there," Washburn said. "I don't think I approached the rest of his at-bats any different."

In fact, Washburn did come back two innings later and struck Bonds out -- falling behind, 2 and 1, mixing in a couple of breaking balls off the plate, then getting Bonds to uncharacteristically chase an 89-mph fastball under the shoulders on 3-2.

"Jarrod came out aggressive," said his pitching coach, Bud Black, "and that same aggressiveness showed up the next at-bat, when he punched him out."

And that actually was no surprise, even to Barry.

Afterward, Bonds didn't have a whole lot to say -- not that we needed to interrupt regular programming for that bulletin. But he did report that he'd been warned in advance about Washburn's aggressive game plan by his old teammate, Black.

"Bud Black came up to me tonight at the batting cage," Bonds said, "and he said, 'You're going to get pitches to hit.' "

Pretty darned good scouting report, we'd say.

"And," Bonds pronounced, "I got one."

He got one, all right. And the air-traffic controllers are still trying to figure out what that blip was on their radar screens. But Bonds also made sure to put his mighty blast in perspective by adding: "Games aren't won in the first inning. They're won in the ninth inning."

Well, Abner Doubleday can vouch for that. But that doesn't mean World Series can't be changed by what the big man in the spotlight does in the first wave of his magic wand, either.

All we know is that, in the eighth inning, the Angels brought in their designated one-man anti-Barry missile system, left-hander Scott Schoeneweis, to remind Bonds why he'd gone 1 for 7, with four strikeouts, in their previous battles. Four ugly pitches later, Bonds was strolling down that first-base line for the 15th time in 11 postseason games.

"We've seen it 100 times this year," Aurilia said. "He comes up to the plate. They bring a left-hander in. He winds up walking him on four pitches. Then they take him out. That guy (Schoeneweis) is the only left-hander in their bullpen. Why not just leave the right-hander in, set the catcher up way out there on the outside part of the plate, just throw four out there and not waste the left-hander?

"You wonder about that. But that's Barry. I'm sure they'll think about that home run for the rest of the series."

Hey, the rest of us will. Why wouldn't the guys in the other dugout do the same?

After all, you need to think about what this home run meant: Game 1. Many miles down the freeway. Pandemonium reigning. CheerStix pounding. Monkey getting ready to jump. And the star of our show looks at it all and says, "Take this."

"I hope he hits four, five, six, seven more," Aurilia said. "The more he hits, the better chance we've got. I just know it was nice to come in here, into an environment where it's loud, it's noisy, it's really red, and take the lead."

Which they then ... Hey, wait a second. Did he just say, "really red?"

"Yeah," Aurilia said. "It was red enough that we could tell where our families were in the family section. You could see the little swatches of black out there amidst the red. It was more red here than it was in St. Louis."

Ah ... but now who's seeing red?

Bonds' homer was followed by a Reggie Sanders homer. Which offset Troy Glaus' first homer.

Which set the stage for a two-run J.T. Snow homer. Which came an inning after Snow had burned out a tail light while making a part-genius, part-Three Stooges, film-at-11 catch of a Tim Salmon foul ball.

Which was enough for the Giants to hold off the charge of a stoked-up Rally Monkey in the late innings. And the Giants were especially grateful to have withstood the mysterious power of the primate, which peaked with His Monkiness making a new cameo appearance in a scene from the old Tom Cruise classic, "Risky Business."

"We didn't have an advance (scouting) report on the monkey," Aurilia revealed. "But they've got their monkey. We've got a Disney character pitching Game 4 for us. (That would be Kirk Rueter -- whose nickname, "Woody," derives from his astonishing resemblance to a character in "Toy Story.") So it's the Monkey versus a Disney character. I like our chances."

But you can be sure he liked them even better when No. 25 deposited the first baseball he hit into the carpool lane of the Pomona Freeway.

"That," Aurilia said, "was a great moment for him -- and a great moment for us."

Jayson Stark is a senior writer for ESPN.com.