He probably feels persecuted at this point, and it’s easy to see why. Whatever he did was only what everyone else was doing, and, until 2003, wasn’t even against baseball’s rules. Yet he’s being pursued with a single-minded determination that hasn’t been applied to any other athletes in any other sport.

It’s hard to figure the tenacity with which the FBI is pursuing this case. Victor Conte, the head of BALCO Labs, which is at the center of the controversy, served a mere six months for supplying drugs. But Bonds’ former trainer, Greg Anderson, has already served more time for refusing to talk about what Bonds did or didn’t take, and two San Francisco reporters are also facing jail for refusing to testify about where they got copies of grand jury testimony in the case.

All this for what’s pretty much a two-bit drug case. It makes you wonder why no one showed the same prosecutorial zeal in tracking down the authors of the mendacious report that launched the invasion of Iraq. That, as some of you are sure to remind me, is bringing politics into sports, but politics has been part of this probe from the beginning.

It’s not really about solving a drug problem; that’s being done with the league’s new testing policy. Instead, it’s about stopping Barry Bonds. The government has never  seemed to care much about drugs in other sports, and the feds have done nothing to address performance-enhancing drugs where they start and where they may do the most damage — in high school. Football players test positive all the time and there has yet to be a Congressional hearing on it.

Even in baseball, everything is about the home run record. The game’s dependence on amphetamines for decades has prompted no outrage. Pitchers are barely mentioned in discussions of performance enhancers. It’s just home runs, which means that it’s mostly about Bonds.

The feds want to bring him down before he does the same to Aaron. And Wednesday’s ruling could do for the game what it couldn’t do for itself.

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