COMMENTARY

By Tim Dahlberg

updated 1:11 a.m. ET March 26, 2006

Barry Bonds has been called a lot of things over the years. Feared slugger, future Hall of Famer, steroid abuser and pompous jerk are among those that most immediately come to mind.

Who would have ever imagined adding protector of America’s justice system to the list?

Lawyers for Bonds, apparently. Because there they were in court Friday armed with legal claims so laughable you wonder why they didn’t just drop them off at the back door and run really fast before someone found out who had done it.

Before the flurry of legal activity, you might have thought all Bonds had to worry about this spring was where to put his recliner in the locker room and how to remember the difference between the cream and the clear.

Turns out the slugger has more weighty things on his mind. He’s worried about the fragility of the grand jury system in California.

Sure he is. His lawyers say so, so it must be true.

“The true victim is not Barry Bonds, but the sanctity and integrity of the grand jury process,” one of them wrote.

Funny, victim isn’t a term that usually comes to mind when describing Bonds. Then again, crusader for justice isn’t, either.

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Before the book “Game of Shadows” came out the most experience Bonds had in a courtroom — aside from his appearance before the BALCO grand jury — was when he asked a judge to reduce his child support payments because the 1994 baseball strike had cut into his multimillion-dollar income.

Now he’s gone to court to stop authors of the book from making money from it because he believes the grand jury system needs to be protected.

Maybe this is a new side of Bonds we haven’t seen before. Maybe when the season begins he plans to tackle the issue of global warming, or work on a solution for Social Security on long road trips.

FREE VIDEO Bonds' lawsuit The authors of a book alleging steroid use by Barry Bonds tell MSNBC's Keith Olbermann that they are puzzled by a lawsuit against them which does not claim the book is inaccurate. Countdown

Or maybe he’s just trying to divert attention from the fact the book painstakingly lays out just how Bonds juiced himself with such a smorgasbord of various substances that he’s on the verge of owning every home run record in the game.

The most interesting thing about the suit isn’t the legal claims it makes, because they are so silly that they will likely be tossed out before Bonds has a chance to park a ball in McCovey Cove this season.

What is most interesting is what isn’t said.

There are no claims that the material in the book is false. And there is no contention that San Francisco Chronicle reporters Mark Fainaru-Wada and Lance Williams libeled Bonds in a book based not only on grand jury testimony but a variety of other documents and interviews with some 200 people.

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