Mike Celizic

Just quit now, Barry. Feed us a story about your knee aching or your vision going blurry and say you can’t continue to play the game. Hell, tell us you’ve decided to go to Nepal to commune with Yetis. Make up any cockamamie excuse to hang them up. We promise to believe anything that will keep your steroid-bloated carcass off the field.

You can’t continue to chase Aaron and Ruth, not now that your whole putrid story is hitting the newsstands and bookstores. You can’t insult the game and its fans and all the great players who went before you.

You have to quit.

That’s what anyone with a smidgen of a shred of a scintilla of decency would do. He’d stand up, admit he’s been exposed, say he’s sorry and never infest the game with his presence again.

But we’re talking about Barry Bonds, a man who makes Donald Trump look like the picture of humility. We’re talking about a man who set his eyes on a goal and convinced himself that it didn’t matter how he got there. We’re talking about a man whose vision never has extended beyond his own wants and desires and self-interest.

So his resignation probably is not forthcoming. Not even a book, excerpted in the current Sports Illustrated and documenting all the steroids, human growth hormone and other drugs he took to make himself the most prolific pounder of long balls in history, is likely to dent Bonds’ armor of arrogance.

He’s on a quest to become the greatest home-run hitter of all time, and if 200 sources and thousands of pages of documents can be believed, he’s already broken the law to get there. So if the final leg of the journey is through torrents of outrage, disgust and shame, what can he care?

All lies, he’ll probably say of the book, or, in the immortal words of Don King, hearsay and insinuendo. If he took anything illegal, he took it innocently, a wide-eyed and trusting naïf who believed his trainers and pharmacists when they stuck needles in his backside, squirted chemical cocktails under his tongue, rubbed steroid-laced cream on his bulging muscles and told him they were just giving him vitamins.

It’s all justified in his own mind. According to the book, in 1998 he watched Mark McGwire yank 70 home runs out of the park and was consumed by jealousy because this big, muscle-bound white guy — his reported words — was getting more attention than Bonds was getting with his 37 homers.

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He doubtless concluded — and he’s not the only one — that McGwire’s muscles weren’t all issued by nature. As luck would have it, baseball didn’t care. It had no rules prohibiting the use of steroids, no policy to test for performance-enhancing drugs. The game itself gave its tacit, if not explicit, approval to anything and everything that made balls fly out of the park.

Commissioner Bud Selig came off last year as a caped crusader against performance-enhancers, chewing the scenery before Congress in his zeal to rid his game of their evil presence. But through the 1998 race between Sammy Sosa and McGwire to erase Roger Maris’ single-season record of 61 home runs, Selig said nothing. And through the subsequent years, when baseball witnessed an unprecedented explosion of power that culminated in Bonds’ 73-homer season, the commissioner still said nothing.

Slide show   Giant among men A look back at some key moments in the amazing career of Barry Bonds

Attendance was booming, the owners were counting the take, and the game did nothing until Congress finally demanded an accounting.

And Selig and baseball have to live with the consequences. They wanted records. They got records. And the bill is due.

This isn’t a black eye to the game. It’s a back-alley beating.

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