Eric Risberg / AP

Barry Bonds is being unfairly targeted by the FBI, writes MSNBC.com columnist.

Bonds’ real crime is passing Babe Ruth and challenging Hank Aaron’s all-time home run record. The FBI, it seems, has a lot of agents who are baseball fans. Unlike other fans who would like to see Bonds taken down a peg or 12, the FBI has the resources to do it.

What’s telling is that they had to take down Grimsley to do it. Months have gone by since the reports first surfaced that Bonds was being investigated for lying to grand jury and tax fraud. If the feds had solid evidence on those charges, it would seem to be enough. Tax fraud is what brought down Al Capone and Pete Rose. It would work just as well on Bonds.

We're coming down to the wire now, as any indictment probably will come in the next two weeks, if at all.

But when they started putting pressure on Grimsley, you got the idea their other investigations aren’t going anywhere very quickly. Either they’re not very good or Bonds has covered his backside with remarkable thoroughness.

OK, it’s frustrating to everyone to have the charges out there and not to know the truth. Major League Baseball has its own investigation being led by George Mitchell that’s supposed to determine the full extent of the problem that existed before the current testing policy went into effect.

I’ve always thought the investigation is poorly conceived. The real culprit all along has been the game itself, and it’s been aided and abetted by the players association. It’s hard to blame individual players for doing what the game effectively encouraged them to do by turning a blind eye to how so many players were hitting so many home runs. The game loved it when the turnstiles were spinning and baseball was the talk of the nation. It has no right now to blame the players, especially when they were using substances that weren’t banned by the game.

Going backwards now serves no purpose. All Mitchell can conclude is that half the league was doing it, from the biggest stars to fringe players like Grimsley. And they were doing it because neither Major League Baseball nor the players association saw any reason to stop them.

A federal indictment of Bonds isn’t going to change that and it’s not going to make anything better. This isn’t like bringing down a drug ring, a mafia family or an insider trading conspiracy, where you enlist the lower-level criminals to bring down the top guys. Bonds isn’t Mr. Big or the godfather or the CEO or Enron. He’s one ballplayer who did the same thing as hundreds of others.

Going after him isn’t pursuing justice. It’s a witch hunt.