Bonds’ problems will mar baseball Slugger’s place in history at stake

We now begin the agonizing road down the trail of the Barry Bonds legal saga. This is O.J. Simpson all over again – and sad.

There are so many issues involved in this mess that it boggles the mind.

The legal proceedings are one thing. Bonds faces charges of lying to a grand jury and obstructing the investigation into his use of performance-enhancing drugs.

The Mitchell report on the issue of such drug use in all of baseball, as requested by baseball commissioner Bud Selig, is due out shortly. There will be more names, and Bonds may be included in those.

Major League Baseball, completely independent of any legal proceeding against Bonds or anyone else, must decide how to act on whatever appears in the Mitchell report.

Active players can be suspended or otherwise punished, even if they are not forced into legal proceedings and even if they are found innocent after legal proceedings.

Remember, a player can be found innocent of criminal charges in these matters and still face nonlegal action by MLB.

Bonds’ place in baseball history is up for grabs. There have already been numbers crunched that say his totals are far beyond anything that could have been expected. If his numbers are the result of steroid use, they can be recalculated based on reasonable projections over his career.

Those new totals reduce his home run number by more than 100, according to an analysis that appeared in the New York Times on Dec. 12, 2004.

Bonds’ chances of being elected to the Hall of Fame are in jeopardy.

If convicted on one or more of the charges, is that enough to keep him out? Is lying to a grand jury in and of itself enough for Hall of Fame-voting writers not to vote for him?

Everyone believes he was a Hall of Fame player even before he used drugs, if indeed he did, so does he get elected anyway?

If he is found not guilty legally, but MLB determines he used performance-enhancing drugs in violation of baseball rules, do the numbers get recalculated for the record books? Is there as asterisk? Does that affect his Hall election?

In a column this week in USA Today, Christine Brennan wrote that there are two very distinct fan views of baseball today. The older fans want the game played by the rules without artificial enhancers to protect the sanctity of the game and validity of the records.

Some younger fans, she wrote, view the game as simply entertainment and want to see the home runs and don’t really care what the players took to hit them.

That is worthy of a raging controversy and one that will probably be ignited by the Bonds indictment.

The saddest part is that the players who love the game, play it hard and by the rules, take a back seat to all this messy news that puts the cheaters in the headlines.

That is sad. That is our public society today.

Maybe those more decent folks, both inside and outside the game, can move the good back into the spotlight and bring some positive out of what is going to be a long and ugly immediate future for Bonds and baseball.

Old Town native Gary Thorne is an ESPN and ABC sportscaster.