King Kaufman's Sports Daily

"Game of Shadows": The Barry Bonds steroid book fills us in on what we already knew, and it's still explosive. What's shocking is how far ahead the cheaters are.

Read more: Sports, Baseball, War on Drugs, San Francisco Giants, Barry Bonds, Bud Selig, narcissism, Steroids, King Kaufman, Sports Daily

March 8, 2006 | So, how do you suppose that Barry Bonds-led improved team chemistry thing is going for the San Francisco Giants right about now?

The crazy thing about the revelations in "Game of Shadows," the explosive book by two San Francisco Chronicle reporters about Bonds' steroid use that hit the Web Tuesday and newsstands Wednesday in a Sports Illustrated excerpt, is that for all its very real explosiveness, there aren't any major revelations in it.

For all the moral clarity on display in the commentariat over the past 24 hours and no doubt the next 24,000 or more, for all the talk that now, for sure, the record books should be wiped clean of Barry Bonds' name, Cooperstown's doors should be closed to him, baseball should do, well, something, we haven't woken up to a different world, or even a different Barry Bonds.

Did we not already know that Bonds has been juicing during the late-career surge that has him on the verge of passing Babe Ruth on the all-time home run list? Were we not already well versed on Bonds' narcissism, fully aware that he's an almost inhumanly boorish lout?

The outline of the story, we knew. What authors Lance Williams and Mark Fainaru-Wada have given us is the details. Exhaustive research and dogged reporting by these two, who have been out front on the story of the BALCO steroid-lab scandal for two years, have resulted in a picture of Bonds' descent into drug abuse that's painfully, pardon the pun, clear.

Quick disclosure: I worked with Williams at the San Francisco Examiner, sometimes copy-edited his work and knew him in a nod-hello-on-the-sidewalk kind of way.

Anyone out there who somehow believed Bonds was clean before Tuesday, that he was the victim of a witch hunt, just another black man getting the business from the white media, I commend you for your faith and optimism.

I'm a guy who devoted two weeks to making the case for Barry Bonds as National League MVP in 2004, when he was ridiculously better than anyone else but dismissed as a steroid fraud by many, and even I was convinced by his leaked grand jury testimony 10 weeks later.

Anyone out there who somehow still believes after the release of the "Game of Shadows" excerpt that Bonds is legit, the victim of a witch hunt, just another black man getting the business from the white media, I respectfully submit you have lost connection with reality and are in need of psychological counseling. Seriously.

Next page: The real revelation of "Game of Shadows": The cheaters are amazingly safe from law enforcement