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Bonds indictment: It's shaping up as a bang-up steroids offseason. Plus: NFL Week 11.
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Nov. 16, 2007 | The Barry Bonds indictment doesn't figure to change much -- except for Bonds, for whom it might change his address.
The free-agent slugger could face prison time if he's convicted of the four charges of perjury and one charge of obstructing justice unsealed by federal prosecutors in San Francisco Thursday. Bonds is accused of lying in grand jury testimony in the BALCO case when he said he never knowingly took steroids.
His lawyer says he'll fight the charges.
If the trial stretches into the season, or if he's convicted, it'll obviously affect his chances of signing with a team to play in 2008, though I'm not buying the speculation that the indictment means his career is over. If he's free to play, someone will pay him to play.
If you can put up a .400 on-base percentage with power, some team's going to sign you unless you're actually standing over a dead body with a smoking gun in your hand. And even then, four or five teams will ask if it's your gun. One or two will ask if anybody else knows about the body.
What I mean by the indictment not changing much is that even a conviction won't alter either the current public perception of him or history's view of him. Nor will it do much to accomplish that thing we're all rooting for, cleaning up the game.
The view of Bonds will certainly change if he spends the next few decades behind bars. At some point we'll start to think of him as a prisoner. But that's highly unlikely. Sentencing guidelines say he could get up to 30 years, but the San Francisco Chronicle reports that legal experts say he could realistically face about 30 months.
Bonds has his supporters, and the creativity required to believe he never did steroids is easily sufficient to explain away a perjury conviction. For those of us who don't require the same standard of proof a federal criminal court does to believe something, an acquittal isn't going to convince us that Bonds was clean as both he and his power numbers ballooned.
The last baseball player of Bonds' fame to be indicted for a major crime was Pete Rose, who served five months on a tax-evasion rap starting in August 1990. Did you even remember that? Before he was indicted, Rose was thought of as a sleazeball who bet on baseball games. Now, he's thought of as a sleazeball who bet on baseball games. A conviction and prison term on a related charge didn't do a thing to his reputation.
Bonds' reputation is what matters to those of us out here in the regular world because we don't much care about him as a person -- he's made sure of that over the years -- but we like to argue about whether he'll make the Hall of Fame, and this off-season it's become interesting to speculate what team, if any, will sign him.
That speculation's on hold while we all become experts on perjury and obstruction of justice, the way we became experts on chain of evidence when O.J. Simpson was on trial a dozen years ago. With former Sen. George Mitchell expected to release his report on steroids in baseball before the end of the year, this is shaping up as a cracking good off-season for steroid revelations.
We might learn a lot. But it seems unlikely that, beyond details, we'll learn much about Barry Bonds that we didn't already know.
Next page: NFL Week 11 picks: Giants vs. Lions in a big sort-'em-out