Barry Bonds told the Baseball Hall of Fame it was either him or the asterisk baseball. Well, unless the ball was juiced, too, and lied to the grand jury, I'm betting the ball makes it to Cooperstown before Bonds.
Barry Bonds, the former Giants star and baseball's career home run king, was indicted by a federal grand jury today on charges of perjury and obstruction of justice in connection with the BALCO sports steroid scandal.What will Commissioner Bud Selig do? Probably nothing, since he's been willing to do nothing in the face of overwhelming evidence. One of Selig's predecessors is not so willfully blind,
Bonds was indicted for allegedly making false statements to the grand jury that investigated the BALCO steroids distribution ring, the U.S. attorney's office in San Francisco said. Bonds is accused of four counts of perjury and one count of obstruction of justice.
Former baseball Commissioner Fay Vincent called the prospect of Bonds' indictment "a terrific blow to the game," more troubling than the Rose scandal.I wonder who will be hired to clean up this mess.
Rose was "one guy betting on baseball," Vincent told The Chronicle last year. Bonds' indictment, he said, reflects a problem that strikes "right at the heart and the gut of baseball" - the sudden rise in the use of steroids and human growth hormone.
Vincent likened the Bonds case to the worst scandal in baseball history: the 1919 "Black Sox" affair, in which Chicago White Sox hitting star "Shoeless Joe" Jackson and seven teammates were indicted for conspiring with gamblers to fix the World Series.
The players were acquitted at trial, but baseball Commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis, a former judge who had been hired to clean up the game, banned them all for life anyway.
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