Mike Celizic

Baseball’s gone through this before, an embarrassing spectacle that shames the game and saddens all who hold it dear. There was the Black Sox Scandal of 1919, the awful decades of segregation when blacks weren’t allowed in, the Pete Rose banishment, the years of labor wars that culminated in the year with no World Series.

And now the latest depressing episode — the festering pustule that is the steroids scandal — is coming to a head. The game’s greatest unnaturally-fueled player, Barry Bonds, is about to go on trial. The charge is lying to a federal grand jury about his use of performance-enhancing drugs.

It is already 11 years since we suspended disbelief and cheered as Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa dueled through September to shatter Roger Maris’ single-season record of 61 home runs. It is four years since Jose Canseco wrote his smear-all book about steroids and baseball. It is more than one year since the Mitchell Report dragged Roger Clemens into the morass.

And still it’s only just begun. We’ve got Clemens’ collision with the legal system yet to come, and it’s only a matter of time before the other 103 people who tested positive along with Alex Rodriguez will be exposed.

Bud Selig and baseball ignored the problem until it grew to epic proportions. Then, instead of simply insisting on testing and moving on, he ordered an investigation into the full extent of the problem. It wasn’t a can of worms he opened. It was a dumpster of worms and maggots and rot and pollution.

BALCO Barry would have gone on trial regardless of what Selig did. He wasn’t nabbed by baseball but by federal prosecutors investigating BALCO Labs, the outfit that invented the “clear” and the “cream” and for a time kept athletes of every stripe one step ahead of the testers.

Because Selig had to spill that dumpster, Bonds is no longer an isolated athlete who got caught. He’s part of what has become a constant state of pain. It isn’t going to go away. It’s like trying to wash off the stink of skunk with sewer water.

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But even if Bonds is now just another chapter in a saga whose ending will not be written for years, he’s the biggest chapter in the book. He’s the man with the greatest numbers ever assembled by a baseball player. He’s the man who is all but universally assumed to have cheated to set those records. He’s the epicenter of the nightmare.

You wish he would just cut a deal with the prosecutors so we could avoid a trial which will run through the World Baseball Classic and probably intrude on the first week or two of the regular season. It won’t make the steroids scandal go away, but it will at least make him go away.

Bonds has already ceased to exist as far as baseball is concerned. The sense is that most Hall of Fame voters have already decided that he’s not getting wall space in Cooperstown. Neither the voters nor the fans care what happens in his trial. All questions of whether he used steroids and probably human growth hormone are settled.

He clearly doesn’t understand this. There is no other reason for him to so stubbornly deny all the evidence against him. His actions are those of a man who thinks that if he can buy enough lawyers to hornswoggle a jury, he’ll be able to tell the world that he didn’t cheat because he never tested positive and a jury acquitted him.

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If that’s his plan, he’s living in a fantasy world that even Michael Jackson would find strange. He’s also forgetting about O.J. Simpson, who was acquitted by a jury of murder charges, but later held responsible for the deaths in a civil trial. Also, Simpson was never acquitted by the majority of the public.

Bonds has already won some major rulings in pre-trial motions. His positive drug tests will not be presented to the jury. Nor will schedules of his drug cycles. So there is a chance that if he spends seven figures on legal counsel, he can win acquittal.

But what happens at the trial will have no effect on his status after it. Win or lose, he’s going to be a pariah, just like O.J. And unlike fellow baseball outcast Pete Rose, there won’t be loyal platoons of fans and writers begging the game to let him back inside the gates.

He’s finished. That was clear when no team would give him a job last year, even at cut-rate prices. So there’s nothing to accomplish by this exercise but to tear down the game that gave him so much.

With baseball, that always seems to be the way.

More on Barry Bonds  |  Steroids

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