Last week, Duff Wilson and Michael Schmidt of The Times reported that federal authorities are considering criminal charges against the wife and mother-in-law of Bonds’ former trainer, Greg Anderson, in an effort to pressure him to testify against Bonds. According to numerous accounts, it was Anderson who supplied Bonds with the drugs. “I’ve been an attorney for 32 years,” Charles J. Smith, the attorney for Anderson’s wife Nicole Gestas, told the Times. “I was a prosecutor for 10 years. But I have never heard anything like this ... It’s mean-spirited. It really is mean-spirited.”
Threatening family members is conduct worthy of the mafia, not the federal government, particularly in a case that is ultimately inconsequential beyond sensational headlines and another round of “I Hate Barry” frenzy. Protecting the sanctity of baseball? Protecting the sanctity of sports? It’s way too late for any of that self-righteous nonsense in SportsWorld.
Sympathy for the Slugger
By BUZZ BISSINGER
I don’t like Barry Bonds. I don’t like his insouciance and swagger and surliness, his general contempt for anybody who doesn’t share the familial intimacy of his last name. I prayed that he would not break the single-season record for home runs in 2001 with the San Francisco Giants, just as I also prayed that he would not break Hank Aaron’s record for most homers in the history of baseball last season. By the measures of grace and dignity, Aaron is all class and Bonds all trash.
But last week’s news trickling out of the endless investigation of Barry Bonds has caused me to feel something for him I never thought possible: sympathy. And beyond just sympathy, outrage over what has turned from a prosecution into a venomous persecution of someone who, no offense to the pastime purists, is just a baseball player. And I am beginning to think that federal authorities in charge of the pending criminal case against him for perjury have exactly the same attitude many sports fans do — we don’t like Barry Bonds, and since we don’t like him, let’s teach him a lesson he won’t forget. Let’s ruin him, which the federal government is fond of doing in all too many instances.
Just for the record, Barry Bonds is not an axe murderer. He is not a rapist or a child molester. He has been charged with 14 counts of lying to a federal grand jury about his alleged use of steroids and human growth hormone (as well as one count of obstruction of justice). He denies such usage. And that’s where the whole mess sits until his trial next March.
The charges themselves are questionable enough, given that Bonds, even if he knowingly took such drugs, was only doing what so many other major league players were doing in an atmosphere that encouraged such usage, given the appalling lack of internal enforcement by the league itself. If you’re going to indict Barry Bonds for perjury, then aren’t there also some charges on which to indict league commissioner Bud Selig, Major League Players Association head Donald Fehr, every team owner, every general manager, every manager and the legions of others who all hid like quivering cowards when it came to illegal drug use? Their defense — they had no idea of what was going on — is balderdash and poppycock. They all aided and abetted in the crime through willful and deceitful ignorance.
But what is far more disturbing is the way in which the feds are now conducting the case, with a vindictiveness smacking of unseemly obsession.
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Bissinger Is Full Of...
Bissinger's laments and complaints are too late. Way too late. Who, other than sports writers, gives a rat's a** about whether they like or dislike a professional athlete. The only thing Barry Bonds and other professional athlete owes the pubic is a good performance or at least a good effort on days when things are not going well. The continuing persecution of Bonds is disgraceful and, as a black man, I find it hard to believe that it is not fueled in part by racial animus.