Nailing Bonds won't solve steroids issue
July 13, 2006
For the love of the game, can't somebody please put an end to this whole Barry Bonds saga?
A federal grand jury in San Francisco finally may be ready to hand down an indictment against the man who has hit the second-most home runs in baseball history, but it apparently won't be for using performance-enhancing drugs.
No, apparently the feds are going to turn Bonds into a modern-day Al Capone and get him for tax evasion and perjury.
Don't get me wrong - those are serious charges. No one should get away with tax evasion, and our judicial system depends on being able to believe the testimony given under oath. If Bonds has done either, then the justice system should work the same for him as it would for anyone else.
But Bonds is not Capone, the legendary Chicago mobster who allegedly masterminded organized crime in this country during the 1920s and '30s.
Capone was so well insulated that no charges against him stuck, until they got him for tax evasion in 1931. It seemed a petty charge, given the bigger picture of crimes Capone was said to have been involved in, but it did get him out of Chicago (ultimately to Miami, where he retired after a brief stretch in prison).
Barry Bonds is just a baseball player. He may have duped the gullible, baseball-loving public, and offended those who hold baseball records as pure (as if the performance of players in the 1960s, '70s and '80s wasn't enhanced by the drug culture of those eras).
But Bonds' "crimes" hardly seem to have risen to the level of effort the federal government has put into bringing him down.
In the end, do you really believe Bonds will go to jail? He is, after all, a famous person, and famous people rarely face the same penalties that regular people do, if for no other reason than the situations in which famous people find themselves are always more complicated.
Bonds doesn't have a criminal record. There will be an agreement reached. He'll pay back taxes, plus penalties.
And really, what benefit would it be to society to have Barry Bonds spend a day in jail anyway?
The only thing Barry Bonds did (or is accused of doing) that others of his long-ball hitting era didn't do is hang around too long, thereby allowing himself to become the face on a problem that, no matter how far baseball commissioner Bud Selig sticks his head in the sand, won't go away as long as Barry's big head wears a Giants cap.
Bonds' departure from the game, whether the result of an indictment or the realization that he just can't play anymore, won't solve baseball's problems, any more than organized crime went away when Al Capone was sent "up the river."
But Bonds' leaving will make the issue less tangible. There won't be that one name synonymous with steroid use. There will be no controversy over how to deal with the all-time home run record.
Bonds' leaving won't make the problem any less real. But it will allow everyone to feel as if something good has been done, making it easier to ignore the rest of the problem.
Kind of like when the feds finally got Al Capone.
