King Kaufman's Sports Daily

A week into the "now we know" era, how do we think about all those home runs by Barry Bonds? Plus: Week 14.

Dec. 10, 2004 | A week into the era of no one being able to rationally doubt that Barry Bonds has taken steroids, I'm still trying to figure out how to think about it. I've heard the various reactions -- outrage, denial, "Well, duh" and a whole lot of indifferent shrugging -- and none of them quite fits for me.

As you know, the San Francisco Chronicle reported last Friday that Bonds told a federal grand jury in the BALCO case that he'd used substances known as "the clear" and "the cream," now known to contain steroids, but that he didn't know what they were.

In the leaked testimony, Bonds said he believed his friend and trainer, BALCO defendant Greg Anderson, who gave Bonds the items and told him they were nothing more serious than flaxseed oil and an arthritis rubbing balm.

It's a patently ridiculous excuse. The idea that Bonds, an intelligent, elite athlete with an unquestioned work ethic, a well-documented narcissism and a cerebral approach to the game he plays, would unquestioningly put anything on or in his body stretches credulity to the breaking point.

That he would do so in the 21st century, years after steroids became a major story in sports, years after they became a major issue in baseball during the 1998 home run chase, is just absurd. Either Bonds is a liar or he's so stupid he's not worth having any regard for. His continued dismissals of any allegations about steroid use in the last year tell us which is more likely.

We're left with a couple of big questions: How do we think about Bonds' achievements on the field, the awards he's won, the records he's set and the ones he's approaching? And what should baseball do about its exploding steroid problem, which also includes the now-overshadowed revelation that Yankees slugger Jason Giambi, a former American League Most Valuable Player, told the same grand jury he'd juiced up?

The question about what baseball should do is the easy one. The players association has already agreed to negotiate on testing that's more strict than the joke of a program agreed to in the last collective-bargaining agreement.

There's no way around this now. The union has resisted testing for years on the grounds that workers in America shouldn't have to prove their innocence to their employer. But the BALCO revelations mean the players have to prove their innocence to the customers, which is a different thing. And it outweighs any privacy or presumption of innocence concerns. The players know this, and polls show them overwhelmingly favoring stricter testing.

Next page: Testing has to happen, even though it won't work. So what about that asterisk? Plus: NFL Week 14