Mike Celizic

The first — and best — advice any good lawyer will give you is to either tell the truth or say nothing. File this away and remember it if you’re ever in trouble. If your attorney fails to tell you that, get another lawyer. 

Barry Bonds either doesn’t have a good lawyer or is very hard of hearing. Either way, it could be fatal to his pursuit of Hank Aaron. His pursuit of history, on the other hand, is secure. He is either going to be the leading home-run hitter of all time or the first person in baseball history to have his pursuit of a record cut short by an indictment.

A federal appeals court has ruled that the FBI investigators who are pursuing a perjury indictment against Bonds can have access to more than 1,400 urine tests Major League Baseball conducted on its players during 2003. By agreement with the players association, the identities of those tested were to remain anonymous. The tests themselves were used to establish a baseline for future testing of players; no penalties were to be handed out for testing positive during that first phase of the game’s new drug policy.

It’s not known if Bonds was one of the players tested, but it is known he has testified that he never tested positive for performance-enhancing drugs. If the FBI finds a sample with his name on it and a positive result, his words will go down in the annals of perjury next to “I didn’t have sex with that woman.”

And don’t worry, if Bonds’ name turns up on a positive urine test, we’ll know about it. Everything else relating to this case has found its way into print, and someone will be sure to see to it that the news will get to reporters — turning a literal leak into a figurative one.

A lot of other names will find their way into print, too, doing for the game what its own investigator, former U.S. Sen. George Mitchell, hasn’t been able to do. Mitchell has been able to make little headway; lacking subpoena power, he’s been unable to convince anyone to talk about drugs in the game. The players understandably want the issue to just go away. Baseball wants to prolong the pain.

If Bonds’ name turns up on a positive test, baseball commissioner Bud Selig — after breaking out the champagne in league headquarters — could invoke his “best interests of the game” powers to suspend Bonds until the conclusion of the investigation. Given the speed at which the legal process moves, that would end the coming season and maybe one or two after that, effectively ending Bonds’ career and quest.

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The union would appeal such a ruling, but Selig would probably prevail. In the eyes of some, Selig would look like the good guy in all this, but in reality, if he’d done something about the problem during the ’90s when the problem started brewing, we wouldn’t be having this discussion now.

What the FBI would do is save Selig’s backside. Bonds would be — and this is all speculative — done in by an arrogance which convinced him that the best course of action was to deny everything. When he denied knowing what he was taking and insisted he never tested positive, he may have thought those were little lies that no one would catch. But in the eyes of the law, there’s no such thing as a little lie. One just as small as the one most people think Bonds told almost brought down a presidency. Bonds should have been taking notes.