Barry Bonds is done, finished. And that is as it should be.
He has lied, connived and mocked anyone who had the temerity to question his authenticity.
He has played the race card, the victim card and the flaxseed-oil card. He has denied the obvious for so long that it is no small miracle his nose did not grow in proportion to his oversize cranium.
But now the charade is all but over judging from the court documents that were released by a federal judge this week.
Prosecutors contend that Bonds used performance-enhancing drugs and tested positive on five occasions in a nearly six-year period starting Nov. 28, 2000. Two of the positive tests - in 2003 and 2006 - were administered by Major League Baseball.
Not that the lords of baseball, in management and labor, were all that interested in uncovering the extent to which steroids were compromising the integrity of the game.
Bud Selig, armed with a performance-based contract tied to the game’s revenues, certainly was not in a rush to uncover the reasons behind the home run binge. Maybe it was just mom’s apple pie that was aiding the home run hitters and strikeout artists.
Prosecutors are seeking to show that Bonds lied to a federal grand jury in December 2003 when he said he never knowingly used steroids.
And if he lied, Bonds will receive an all-expenses-paid vacation inside a federal facility, just as Marion Jones did.
It was not the crime that is threatening to strip Bonds of his last remnants of dignity and freedom. It is the cover-up. It is the sense of entitlement. It is the surliness. It is all this unpleasant stuff that eventually will ensnare Roger Clemens.
Prosecutors have a mountain of evidence against Bonds. They have dates. They have witnesses, including several of Bonds’ ex-teammates. They have a tape-recorded conversation between Steve Hoskins, Bonds’ childhood friend and former personal assistant, and Greg Anderson, Bonds’ former trainer, who already has gone to jail twice after refusing to answer the questions of the grand jury.
Anderson’s attorney says his client is not about to start singing now, so he is destined to receive yet another change of address from the feds.
The high-powered attorneys entrusted with obfuscating the feds’ case against Bonds no doubt will be splitting legal hairs every step of the way. They will raise objections. They will argue that nearly every piece of evidence is inadmissible.
They will do what all good defense lawyers do, which is ferret out every legal precedent and seek every legal technicality to aid their client.
Yet Bonds already has lost the case, big-time, in the court of public opinion. His remaining defenders dwindle with each revelation.
Talk about the so-called Roger Maris asterisk, which never actually existed in the record book.
As it turns out, Maris remains baseball’s all-time single-season home run leader. It is not Bonds. It is not Mark McGwire. And it is not Sammy Sosa. They are all tainted. They are all something out of Dr. Frankenstein’s lab, only they have a syringe sticking out of each side of their bulging necks instead of an electrode.
Bonds will be the first to go down, Clemens the next.
And they will go down because of their hubris. They could have come clean long ago, taken the hit to their reputation and gone about the rehabilitation process.
That is what Jason Giambi did. And he has been able to distance himself from the drug scourge on some level. He at least recognized the potential severity of the fallout and conceded his guilt.
Now Giambi is working with the prosecutorial team, ready to testify at the trial that begins March 2. The New York Times reports that Giambi will finger Anderson as his drug supplier.
And that will be just the beginning of the end of Bonds.
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