Michael Ventre

The asterisk is a confusing little critter. In horse racing, it’s a good thing. If there is an asterisk in the racing form, it denotes a “bug boy,” an apprentice jockey who is getting a weight break, thereby making him attractive to railbirds. Gamblers at the track or off count asterisks in their sleep like some people count sheep. They can’t get enough of the typographical cutie.

But the opposite is true in baseball. An asterisk usually means something’s off. The most famous example is Roger Maris. His 61 home runs in 1961 were assigned an asterisk, and it had nothing to do with a boyish jockey. The lords of baseball temporarily saddled him with that designation because he achieved the record for home runs in a season over the course of a 162-game campaign, rather than the 154-game season in which Babe Ruth accomplished the feat in 1927.

In reality, it doesn’t mean much. The asterisk is just a snide aside. It’s a gentle poke in the ribs. It raises impassioned arguments from sportswriters and broadcasters, but in fact the punctuational porcupine does little to dim the accomplishment.

In fact, I dug out an old “The Baseball Encyclopedia: The Complete and Official Record of Major League Baseball.” This one had a copyright from 1990, well before Mark McGwire went on a rampage, followed soon after by Barry Bonds. In the front, under the category of “Individual Batting (Single Season)” and the subcategory of “Home Runs,” there was Roger Maris and his 61 — with no asterisk. Then I looked at Maris’ individual stats. It has a tiny numeral “1” next to 61 — not an asterisk — to point out that he was the all-time leader in that category.

Then I went modern, to the MLB.com Web site. The only time it uses asterisks is to denote present-day players among all-time leaders.

Ford Frick, baseball commissioner in 1961, was the one who declared that Maris’ record would be kept separate from Ruth’s. That created a predictable dustup. Later the so-called asterisk was erased and Frick backpedaled on the issue, suggesting there never really was any official dispute over Maris’ accomplishment.

In this case, if the asterisk is brought back for a legitimate reason — to spank a player who showed a lack of respect for the game by cheating — what’s the big deal? It’s just an asterisk. It’s not like future generations will open up the dusty record books and find a “Wanted” poster of Barry Bonds.

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Although the asterisk is largely (ahem) symbolic, I believe it should indeed apply to Bonds, as long as we’re doling out a bunch of them over spirited debates.

Bonds would have finished as one of the game’s all-time greats with or without performance-enhancing substances. But he chose to use them because he wasn’t satisfied with being one of the all-time greats. His ego was too massive, even bigger than his head is now. He seethed with jealousy over McGwire, and he wanted to be THE home-run king. And to get there, he took a short cut via BALCO.

The argument that such allegations haven’t been proved don’t really hold up. The evidence is there in a book called “Game of Shadows” by Mark Fainaru-Wada and Lance Williams, conveniently dismissed by deniers but rarely disputed in convincing fashion.

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The authors use leaked grand jury testimony, confidential memos from interviews of athletes conducted by federal agents and affidavits from federal investigators, among other evidence, to show a training regimen by Bonds that included the taking of Winstrol, Deca-Durabolin, human growth hormone, insulin, testosterone decanoate, trenbolone (which increases muscle in beef cattle), Clomid and two designer substances known as the Clear and the Cream.

The veracity of their reporting is such that Troy Ellerman, the attorney later found to have leaked the grand jury testimony to the reporters, was sentenced to 30 months in prison because of it. It would have never become an issue, and he would never have been sentenced to prison, if he leaked bogus information.

For his part, Bonds has denied taking any performance-enhancing substances. He said he thought the “Clear” and the “Cream” were simply flaxseed oil and an arthritic balm.

But as Fainaru-Wada and Williams point out, between 1986 and 1998 Bonds hit .290, averaging 32 homers and 93 RBI per season; he averaged one home run every 16 at-bats. From 1999 through 2004, he hit .328, averaging 49 home runs and 105 RBI; he averaged one home run every 8.4 at-bats.

Those later numbers represent an average of 17 additional home runs per season, and 12 additional RBI per season.

And the feds — who have a 95 percent conviction rate, and don’t indict unless they’re reasonably certain they can get a conviction — just got a six-month extension of the grand jury investigating Bonds for perjury. They don’t go that far unless they have something serious cooking. That is cause for alarm for Mr. “Do I Look Concerned?”

With so much evidence available that Bonds cheated to get ahead, why is there such reluctance to assign his breaking of Hank Aaron’s record of 755 career home runs an itty-bitty blemish that is largely imaginary anyway?