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Barry Bonds Indictment: 755, No Asterisk

by Christopher McIntosh
11/20/2007

Barry Lamar Bonds.

Indicted. Not for lying about a criminal case. Not even for lying about sexual indiscretions that could prove embarrassing.

No. Mr. Bonds, despite having 100% immunity for any crime he may have committed, as well as an airtight guarantee that any sensitive information he provided would not be leaked or used against him, lied.

He lied to all baseball fans, he lied to Major League Baseball, he lied to his own fans (wherever they hide), but most importantly, he lied to the Feds.

And as anyone who's been even half awake during the Michael Vick horror knows, if there's one thing you do not do under any circumstances, it's lie to the Feds.

Especially when they give you immunity.

Think about it. The man had immunity from prosecution both from MLB and from the government for anything he said, and unlike all the other ballplayers (see Jason Giambi) he chose to act like the rules didn't apply to him.

So now what? This is isn't some "say it ain't so, Joe" moment where our collective innocence is called into question. If you didn't already think that there was something fishy going on inside that freakish body of his that seemed to grow only after McGwire and Sosa (admittedly, half the players Bonds was) got all that love during the 1998 season, you were either dumb or willfully disregarding the facts.

Heads don't grow like that. Feet don't grow like that. Facial structures don't change like that.

And ballplayers - even perhaps the greatest of all time - don't suddenly go from being unable to hit more than 50 home runs in a season to jacking 73 in a stadium not especially conducive to such an outrageous accomplishment.

Fast forward to last year. We all knew it was coming. 756 was inevitable, yet Hank Aaron claimed he was "unwilling and unable to travel" to see it, given his age. Bud Selig played coy about his attendance almost up until the moment Mr. Bacsik served up history. And even then Selig had to be reminded by a colleague to stand up and clap.

Because that wasn't the first thing it made him want to do.

Lots of people bagged on these two. They're being petty. Hank wants his record. Selig likes Hank and hates Barry.

You think Selig didn't have people who were feeding him a bit of information about this grand jury testimony? Makes you think about just how much Bud knew and when and what the plans were beforehand. If it took four years to dot the i's, as one prosecutor put it, the difference of three months ain't that much.

If this happens three months earlier I'm not sure Bonds would have been the home run king. If it happens one month earlier and Selig had fully embraced Bonds, then what does the commissioner do? What credibility would he have on steroids then? What would the Mitchell Report have possibly been able to do?

But like most media types, I'm avoiding the issue. We know he's done with baseball - no GM will touch him and he was already only capable of DHing for an enormous price. We don't know if the Feds will win the case or if Barry will plead guilty. We do know - as we learned in 1919 - that no matter what happens in the trial, Selig can use that evidence to suspend him, regardless of the trial's ultimate outcome.

We also know, as a sort of canary in the coal mine, that Marion Jones went from never once failing a test, protesting her innocence at every opportunity despite having a mountain of circumstantial evidence against her - ties to Balco, her ex-husband's doping issues - to flipping like a street level Mafia button man, pleading guilty and begging for public forgiveness almost immediately.

Why? What did they have on her? Obviously, it was something big... and Bonds' case involves many of the same people, places, and samples.

But again, ultimately irrelevant. Handicapping the trial and Bonds' actions ain't too difficult and ain't much fun.

The real question is the simple one.

762.

Does it become 762*? Or does it become 755?

I don't think an asterisk is strong enough. And it's not something MLB has ever done meaningfully. I think striking it from the books is what needs to be done. If he had obliterated the record, that'd be one thing. Then maybe you could argue that since we don't precisely know how much the drugs helped that would be too harsh.

But we're talking about 7 lousy home runs. 7. 7 is the difference between one of the most honorable, most talented, most accomplished player's home run total which broke a record previously held by one of the singular American icons - a white icon, it's worth mentioning, because it certainly was worth something to those people who chased his family, threatened him, and treated him like his pursuit of excellence was somehow an affront to American society. For them, and unfortunately many silent others, Aaron should have just "known his place."

Bonds, by comparison, may, quite shortly, be a felon whose crime was lying to cover up his successful efforts at cheating - efforts motivated by a desire to own those very records that we are unsure what to do with.

If he's convicted or pleads guilty, I want everyone who said, "I won't say anything negative about him because we just don't know if he used steroids" to accept the flip side of their argument and take a stand against him because they do have evidence that he cheated.

Lying to the Feds undermines the entirety of our justice system. It's why it's so zealously prosecuted.

Cheating to acquire records undermines the entire ethic of record keeping and celebrating in baseball.

755. No asterisk. That's my vote.

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