A real punishment would be to banish him from baseball. That’s not going to happen. Baseball could also wipe out his records. That wouldn’t wash, either; commissioner Bud Selig and his cohorts are too frozen with indecision to attempt anything so drastic. Selig couldn’t even decide if he would show up when Bonds breaks the record, presumably because he was waiting to see if any news broke on the legal front that would make his decision easier.

Rather than serve as an outrageous affront to Bonds and his dwindling legion of sycophants, an asterisk works as a compromise solution for baseball to indicate that records broken during the steroids era should be considered separate from previous marks such as Aaron’s, which were attained honorably.

Listen, everybody knows what’s going on. Mark McGwire and his shaky Congressional testimony. Rafael Palmiero and his adamant denial on Capitol Hill, followed shortly thereafter by a positive drug test. Bonds going from a relative 98-pound weakling to a WWE hulk in the space of one offseason. Jason Giambi’s admissions.

And don’t forget countless other little guys, minor leaguers or bit players whose periodic suspensions by baseball take up but a measly sentence or two in newswire roundups, but considered together represent an epidemic.

The use of performance-enhancing substances is rampant, and apparently here to stay. But the appropriate response to wrongdoing is not to shrug it off. It’s to do something. Assigning an asterisk, a benign designation with no legal clout and little historical impact, is the very least an impotent baseball leadership can do to show respect for people like Aaron, Maris, et al., who accomplished their achievements through hard work, dedication and perseverance.

And the argument that such substances were not against the rules of baseball is specious at best. They may not have been spelled out in baseball’s rule book, but they were against the law. The laws of society supercede the rules of baseball.

To my knowledge, there are also no specific rules against players carrying handguns on the field of play, against parking your Mercedes in center field or against employing prostitutes in the trainer’s room. But there doesn’t need to be, because there are laws against those activities.

The Anabolic Steroids Control Act of 1990 classified such substances as illegal in every federal court in the land; it was updated and strengthened in 2004. Also, around 1989 and 1990 most states began enacting their own laws against steroids and their chemical cousins, classifying them as controlled substances and putting them in the same category as amphetamines, methamphetamines, opium and morphine. There have been plenty of laws on the books since Bonds began his home-run indulgences in 1999 to cover his transgressions and to refute his apologists.

Give Bonds an asterisk. Although a wee star, it will serve as an effective counterweight to his suspiciously large achievements.

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