Value not in union with cost

The baseball players association is attempting to find whether the owners are guilty of conspiring against Barry Bonds, the home run leader with an asterisk.

Bonds, of course, wants to play another season but cannot interest anyone in taking on his 43-year-old body, scandal-stained past and team-divisive manner.

To the union, this has the whiff of collusion.

To anyone else, it makes perfect sense.

Bonds still retains certain utilities that would be beneficial to a team, if that is all a personnel director would have to calibrate.

He batted .276 with 28 homers and 66 RBI last season. His on-base percentage was an impressive .480.

But with Bonds, who was indicted on charges of perjury and obstruction of justice in November stemming from his grand jury testimony in the BALCO investigation in 2003, there is considerable baggage to consider.

A team that signed Bonds would be confronted with a massive public relations fallout and media-inspired circus. A team would have to contend with discussing the steroids issue on a daily basis. A team would have to deal with the acrimony anew between his supporters and detractors. No team would willingly embrace all these variables unless his potential production was persuasive enough.

And clearly it is not.

This qualifies as possible collusion on the part of the baseball union, apparently oblivious to the urge of baseball to move past the ethically challenged Bonds, Roger Clemens and Sammy Sosa.

Clemens, who made it through the weekend without being linked to another woman not his wife, has not curried any interest either.

Not that he has expressed a desire to resume his part-time pitching career.

He has been so busy making one public relations gaffe after another that he probably has not had the time to hire another “personal syringe carrier” to attend to his buttocks.

The latter is an image that baseball would like to see purged from the public’s collective conscience.

They all did it, so let’s get over it. At least that is one realm of thought.

That is not fair to Hank Aaron and the rest of the legends of the past.

They have been reduced in scope by the steroids age, an unwelcome reality of a game that celebrates its history like no other sport.

Yet here is the baseball union looking to plant its feet in the field of dung. It is in the investigative phase of the process that will determine whether to play the grievance card in support of Bonds.

Aaron and the family of the late Roger Maris undoubtedly are rolling their eyes in private.

It is not merely the BALCO odor with Bonds. It is his hubris and blind spot that allowed him to see himself as a victim in recent seasons.

Baseball has made the proper calculation that his statistical value does not trump the costs.

That is what markets do.

Bonds remains on the store shelf because of the expense, both in real dollars and the incalculable costs of what his presence would mean to a team.

If this were not so, teams would be on hold waiting to speak with the agent who represents Bonds.

Instead, his agent says Bonds continues to work out on his own while hoping against hope that a team eventually will become desperate enough to give him a shot.

That is not likely, given the game’s steroids-induced fatigue.

The game endured the sight of Bonds overtaking Aaron last season. It endured the Mitchell Report that gave up Clemens, the matching bookend to Bonds. And it endures the pronouncements of Jose Canseco, the self-appointed steroids expert who names names for a quick buck.

The steroids era has not undermined the game’s popularity. It has undermined the game’s statistical magic, which is no small thing.

That baseball is taking a pass on Bonds is understandable.

That the baseball union is investigating that which is painfully obvious is beyond obtuse.