SF Examiner: Time for government to forfeit case against Bonds

SAN FRANCISCO — To the question of whether anyone remains interested in Barry Bonds in his second year out of a Giants uniform, there is a clear and present answer: The U.S. attorney’s office does.

But not to join their team.

They are hardly interested in putting Barry behind, say, the No. 3 hitter. What they want is to put him behind bars.

Lots of luck.

A few days past, federal prosecutors filed a brief requesting a reversal of U.S. District Judge Susan Illston’s well-known decision to bar from Barry’s perjury case evidence she determined to be hearsay.

Yes, Judge Illston’s ruling came back in February, and this is June, but the wheels of justice grind slowly, sort of the way Bonds moved out in left field his last year with the Giants, the 2007 season.

Peter Keane, Dean Emeritus of the Golden Gate University School of Law, told the New York Daily News that the recent government filing “reeks of desperation,” and is merely “postponing the inevitable.”

So feds, give it up already.

We admire your perseverance and attention to detail. If George Washington told the truth, ballplayers probably ought to do the same.

And anybody who has dealt with him, in a courtroom or in a clubhouse, understands Barry can be uncooperative, abrasive and a pain, thus there is an eagerness to get after the man.

But enough. Barry didn’t sell people sub-prime mortgages. Barry didn’t run off with anyone’s 401 (k). Barry didn’t tell the world Iraq had weapons of mass destruction.

The government essentially is wasting millions of our dollars trying to make a mark against a guy who has made his mark, 762 career home runs. What if he were just a singles hitter with a .238 lifetime average?

“These documents tend to show that Bonds was lying when he testified in the grand jury that he did not knowingly take steroids,” U.S. attorney Barbara J. Valliere wrote in a 56-page argument dealing with Bonds.

Los Angeles attorney Mark Geragos, who represents Bonds’ trainer Greg Anderson — aka The Guy Who Won’t Talk — called the government’s appeal “the last vestige of scoundrels.”

The dirty rotten kind or just the ordinary garden variety?

Maybe Barry is guilty, maybe he isn’t. What does it matter any more?

The guy we could call the Slammer for all those long balls is not going to the slammer. He’s almost certainly not even going to trial.

Which is fine with me. Spend the money on something worthwhile, cancer research, feeding the underprivileged. I keep getting images of Javert, the police inspector in Les Miz, who stalks Jean Valjean through the years.

Does America care more that Bonds seemingly cheated in baseball than a lot of guys at banks and loan agencies cheated people out of their homes?

Can’t the feds and Barry, who now also has domestic problems, call this battle a tie without plans for a makeup game?

Bonds’ attorneys might tell the prosecutors how much they admire persistence. The prosecutors might tell Barry and his counsel that while there’s no clock in baseball there should be one in perjury cases.

Then the attorneys can write books and make tons of money. It’s as American as apple pie, motherhood and denial of steroid use.

Art Spander has been covering Bay Area sports since 1965 and also writes at www.artspander.com and www.realclearsports.com.
E-mail him at typoes@aol.com.

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Copyright 2009 SF Newspaper Company

RealClearSports: No Boos for Bonds

By Art Spander

He had come back for the first time this season.

Barry Bonds had returned to the one place he is embraced, not despised. The Bay Area’s last superstar was in the front row at AT&T Park, next to the managing general partner of the San Francisco Giants, waving and smiling.

What a difference a uniform makes. “Laundry” is what Jerry Seinfeld said. Our guys are great. Your guys stink. Wait. Our guy used to be your guy, didn’t he?

For the Giants, their guy, Bonds, started out a long while ago in Pittsburgh, where, as in most of baseball in recent times, he was treated with disdain.

A cheater? A steroid user? A perjurer? Those are the claims against Bonds, and the reasons that, as his career wound down and the home run totals went up, Barry was booed virtually everywhere.

Except San Francisco.

Where this season, the fans have taken to booing Manny Ramirez, who has never been accused of anything similar to Bonds’ sins, but plays for the franchise that drives San Francisco partisans to frustration, the Los Angeles Dodgers.

The Dodgers, hailed and hated, came to San Francisco for a three-game series. Bonds came out of, well, it might not have been hiding – but he does spend his days down in Beverly Hills – to be a willing viewer and to be willingly viewed.

There was Barry, in the seat adjoining that of the individual in charge of the Giants, Bill Neukom, receiving a standing ovation. There was Manny on the diamond, receiving derision for no reason other than he’s Manny. And a Dodger.

Although during the winter, when Manny was a free agent, there was talk he might even sign with the Giants. Which would have made him the new idol in a region that without Bonds, without Joe Montana, Steve Young, Jose Canseco, Jim Plunkett, is bereft of idols.

And so Bonds is remembered fondly. He is the symbol of better days, of headlines and cover stories, of the recognition the Giants, and the region, no longer receive.

Neukom was the lead attorney for Microsoft for nearly a quarter-century. And there he was, schmoozing with someone who has been indicted on perjury, although mostly because the U.S. government, which ought to be more concerned with other matters, is out to get Bonds.

Barry never could have been described as an extrovert, not in dealing with the media. Or should that be not dealing with the media? Yet, from his seat near the Giants’ dugout, Bonds easily moved upstairs to the booth where Mike Krukow and Duane Kuiper do the local telecasts.

Barry communicator. Barry politician. Barry tortured saint.

After the 2007 season, having raised his all-time career home run total to 762, Bonds was not offered a new contract by the Giants. He could hit, but he couldn’t run or throw. He didn’t play in 2008 and, despite insisting he is not retired, surely never will play again.

He’s tainted, and baseball is attempting to step away from the steroids era, so why link up with a bad memory? Bonds, who will be 45 in July, also has slowed.

Is he worth a contract, even ignoring the baggage, which nobody will ignore? Seemingly not, or Barry already would have been on somebody’s roster, presumably a team in the American League where Barry could be a designated hitter.

It would have been interesting to see Barry with, say, the Yankees or Angels, to hear how the fans reacted now that he was on their club. To hear how the San Francisco fans reacted when he was in a different uniform.

In the early 1980s, Reggie Smith was the Manny Ramirez of his time. For Giants fans. One game at old Candlestick Park, they taunted him so much he literally climbed into stands to go after a spectator. Then Smith came to the Giants, a free agent, before the 1982 season. The same people who agitated Smith to a point he wanted to punch them out were now his pals, chanting “Reggie, Reggie, Reggie.”

Mark Twain said politicians, old buildings and prostitutes become respectable with old age. So seemingly do ballplayers, even in the minds of those who wished them ill when they were competing. We are forgiving, especially when it comes to sports.

The farther Bonds moves away from his active days, the more accepted he will be, although at the moment, the one truly safe haven remains San Francisco.

Up here, Bonds is a hero. It’s Manny who is the villain.

As a reporter since 1960, Art Spander is a living treasure of sports history. A recipient of the Dick McCann Memorial Award -- given for his long and distinguished career covering professional football -- he has earned himself a spot in the Pro Football Hall of Fame. And he has recently been honored with the Lifetime Achievement Award by the PGA of America for 2009.

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