ShareThisThis second day of March, now just another manic Monday, looked destined to be a landmark date in baseball's sordid drug history, the date on which the trial of the game's most notorious slugger began in federal court in California.
Instead, there will be a 48-hour delay, at which point hapless drug mule Greg Anderson will be escorted before still another judge to refuse to testify still another time, at which point the Barry Bonds trial will be postponed still again, and this time for months, perhaps even a year.
Thus the unstable weather hustling up the East Coast has become part nor'easter, part billowing sigh of relief from the commission's office, as now the spillage of the Alex Rodriguez mess doesn't have to play out as part of some endless bicoastal media cycle featuring the 100 or so prosecution witnesses against Bonds on the left coast, superimposed against baseball's continuing flummoxity over A-Rod on the other.
Baseball's investigations unit, established in the wake of the Mitchell Report but thus far without any public portfolio, needs some evident muscle, a phrase probably used ill advisedly, as the desire to build muscle is what led us into the anabolic sewer in the first place.
A-Rod was expressing on the weekend his hope that his meeting with Bud Selig's investigators could also be postponed.
He would like it pushed back to about 2020, but even A-Rod can't have everything, which is news to him.
It has been suggested that this column has been perhaps unfairly harsh on the role of Selig and his office as defacto enablers of the steroid era, a position that would be lot easier to advance had not Major League Baseball provided first-class air fare, sumptuous lodging and meals for Anderson as Bonds' guest during a 2002 All-Star tour of Japan. That's in the Mitchell Report, and though it occurred before the BALCO scandal, Giants employees and representatives of the commissioner's office had long suspected that Anderson was running drugs to Bonds and other players.
Were it not for Anderson, Bonds' self-described weightlifting guru, baseball might have been able to see its way out of the juice jungle years ago, but rather than testify in court (or anywhere else) to what's perfectly obvious to the naked eye, that Bonds' body is artificially enhanced, Anderson keeps going to jail.
It doesn't commend Bonds in any way that he's so far been willing to let his friend spend a total of 13 months incarcerated for his silence, and so many have wondered as to the nature of the grip Bonds has on Anderson.
Has the splendid ex-Pittsburgh Bucco splinter-turned Bay Area behemoth threatened to kill Anderson if he talks?
Alleged ex-Bonds mistress Kimberly Bell told the authors of "Game of Shadows" that Bonds threatened to kill her.
Twice.
Or is the bond between Greg and Barry merely renewed evidence of honor among thieves?
It's obvious there is nothing the government can do to compel Anderson's testimony, including initiating tax prosecutions against his wife and his mother-in-law, including the threat of charging him with criminal contempt and obstruction of justice, for which convictions would make Anderson's situation to this point seem a relative inconvenience.
You think Roger Clemens wishes he had trained with Greg Anderson instead of Brian McNamee?
McNamee dragged Clemens all the way to Capitol Hill, where his trouble only began. Anderson seems content to join the California Penal chapter of AARP rather than give up the Shambino that is Bonds.
Susan Illston, the judge in the Bonds trial, rendered this postponement all but inevitable 10 days ago when she ruled inadmissible three positive drugs tests on Bonds in 2000 and 2001 that the government secured in the BALCO raid, along with doping calendars and doping ledgers. In deciding late Friday to appeal that ruling, the government is simply taking its last shot at getting that evidence admitted. Were such evidence disallowed after the start of the trial, it could not be re-admitted due to Constitutional guarantees against double jeopardy.
Legal experts disagree as to whether this gambit will succeed, but even if it doesn't, the government still has a witness claiming to have seen Anderson inject Bonds, a witness other than Bell, who'll say Bonds talked openly about steroids, exhibited classic side effects, including, obviously, 'roid rage. Or did he allegedly threaten to kill her because it's all in a day's abuse?
Had the Bonds trial started Monday and provided an open forum for what the steroid era was all about, for who was involved, for what dark forces drove people to dishonor the game and the honorable people who served it through history, perhaps we could have seen the game's path out of it, a path toward some place where the game again enjoys the deserved confidence of its audience.
Instead, we'll wait, and no one aside from Barry should feel good about it.
(Contact Gene Collier at gcollier@post-gazette.com.)
(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.scrippsnews.com.)
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