I’ve got a million reasons why I shouldn’t be in Barry Bonds’ corner, and one really big one why I should. He’s been massively hosed by the federal government in a prosecution that’s much more like a persecution. The prosecution of Barry Bonds is preposterous, disingenuous, hypocritical, obscenely wasteful and just plain ridiculous. And not necessarily in that order.
I should be all disgusted with Bonds because he shoved my guy, Henry Aaron, from atop the statistical heap of Major League Baseball’s all-time home run list. I never much liked him as a player, though I marveled at his other-worldly abilities that seemed to materialize about the same time as his muscles and enlarged head. In my lifetime, now sailing merrily past six decades, I’ve never seen another player so completely and justifiably feared by the other team was as Bonds was during those giddy years when he was nailing down the last four of his seven Most Valuable Player Awards. But his legendary churlishness with the media seemed way over the top to me, which is not surprising since I typically come down on the side of the argument that says the top-level players have an obligation to cooperate with the fourth estate – within reason.
Despite all of that, I think the government’s frantic pursuit of Bonds over the last decade has been nothing short of shameful. And I should note that my view has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with the debate about if he used steroids. I’m a big boy with a functioning brain and it would seem to me that question has been resolved a long time ago for those of us who don’t have to look at an actual calendar to determine what day of the week it is.
I know, I know, his peril stems not from the use of steroids but from the cover-up. Poopy. The feds can wave that old bit of blather around all they want, that notion that they are protecting the integrity of the grand jury process and the importance of cooperating when Uncle Sammy a comes interrogating, but without Bonds’ entanglement with performance-enhancing drugs there wouldn’t be any perjury or obstruction of justice machinations.
And while I don’t want to see anybody go to jail or even be threatened with going to jail over the use of steroids or other PEDs, I really don’t want to see one guy pulled out of a group of 100 or more tossed into the hoosegow while the others sheepishly watch – apparently facing no peril whatsoever – from the metaphorical dugout.
Our government, which has spent money over the past 40 years in a fashion that would make a formerly drunken sailor like myself blush, will spend between $10 and $40 million in its fetid persecution of Barry Bonds, with the ultimate prize being that he could spend a few months in jail. Nothing described in the previous sentence serves any conceivable public good that you can conjure up.
I will watch all this deplorable nonsense closely in the coming weeks, just as I would linger to watch a horrible car wreck or other disaster. I’ll watch it, but I hate it. And it’s just plain wrong.
- T.S. O’Connell
