When a Federal appellate court threw out Barry Bonds’ conviction for obstruction of justice earlier this week, I thought of Bowie Kuhn. What was the connection? Their answers to questions when they were under oath.
Both Bonds and Kuhn got away with giving answers that induced skepticism in the minds of people who heard them or read about them, Kuhn in Federal court in Chicago in 1977 in Charlie Finley’s lawsuit against him for blocking sales of three players, Bonds before a Federal grand jury hearing testimony in San Francisco in 2007 in the investigation of Balco and steroids.
Covering the trial in the Finley lawsuit, I couldn’t believe some of Kuhn’s answers and wanted to stand up in the courtroom and say, “Your honor, that’s just not so.” I restrained myself, just did my job and didn’t inject my opinion into the coverage.
Finley, who owned the Oakland Athletics, lost the case and was unable to sell Vida Blue to the New York Yankees for $1.5 million and Joe Rudi and Rollie Fingers for $1 million each to the Boston Red Sox. Neither Finley nor his lawyer accused Kuhn of lying, and he prevailed in the lawsuit.
Bonds, who will turn 51 in three months, avoided three perjury charges when the jury deadlocked on a verdict, and the government declined to retry him. He was convicted on an obstruction of justice charge, a verdict that a three-judge appellate panel upheld and then an 11-judge panel threw out.
The larger panel’s ruling was the final blow to the government, which bungled a case that should have been a lock. Prosecutors in Washington, D.C., suffered a similarly humiliating loss in the Roger Clemens perjury case.
The government went after the most highly decorated hitter and pitcher in baseball history and got neither one. No award-winning performances there.
Now that he is free of all felony charges, can Bonds expect to gain the most cherished award that has eluded him – a bronze plaque in the Hall of Fame? Not likely. He and Clemens have been convicted in the court of public opinion, and that status isn’t likely to change.
In three years on the writers’ Hall of Fame ballot (with seven years of eligibility remaining) Bonds and Clemens have failed to attain as much as 40 percent of the writers vote. Free of legal entanglement, Bonds may gain a few more votes, but he needs a deluge of votes to get into the Hall, and they don’t seem to be flowing in his direction.
Bonds’ last team, the San Francisco Giants, will very likely find an enhanced position for him. They have seemed to be interested in having Bonds join them in a meaningful role and will very likely come up with something before too long now that he is unencumbered by legal matters.
On a more general basis, Bonds could benefit from the change at the top of Major League Baseball.
When Bud Selig was commissioner, he was careful not to say anything negative about Bonds publicly, but he clearly didn’t like him and his position as the top home run hitter of all time.
Besides having no interest in being positive about someone with Bonds’ reputation as a user of performance-enhancing drugs, Selig had a personal stake in issues involving Bonds. Bonds had supplanted Selig’s close friend, Henry Aaron, as No. 1 on the career home run list.
Rob Manfred, the new commissioner, who directed MLB’s effort to get steroids out of the game, might have no use for someone as notorious as Bonds, but there’s nothing personal between them. Anyway Manfred is not faced with making any kind of decision on Bonds as he is on Pete Rose. Manfred can ignore Bonds, but he has said he will decide Rose’s request for reinstatement.
As I said before, I believe Bonds has been convicted in the court of public opinion. Not that I have taken a survey, but I don’t think there’s a preponderance of fans who acknowledge him as the No. 1 home run hitter of all time because he hit 762 home runs to Aaron’s 755.
Bonds might never have tested positive for use of performance-enhancing drugs and he might not have been convicted in court of having lied about using them, but he is surrounded by so much circumstantial evidence one false move and it will topple over on him.
Bonds might have his lawyers to thank for keeping him out of prison, but the reality is he owes his freedom to one man – his former trainer, Greg Anderson, who served two separate prison sentences for contempt of court rather than testify in grand jury and court proceedings involving Bonds.
With a friend like Anderson, Bonds didn’t have to worry about enemies. Without having Anderson to confirm that prosecutors’ evidence was legitimate, the government was unable to use the evidence against Bonds.
Steroids? What steroids? I thought I was using flaxseed oil and balm for arthritis, Bonds said.
It sounded ridiculous at the time, but more than a decade later Bonds is free and clear, as clear as one of the creams he allegedly used to mask the steroids.
NO NEWS MUST BE GOOD NEWS
MLB.com claims stories on its website are “not subject to the approval of Major League Baseball or its clubs,” but it makes no claim about printing all the news that is fit to print.
My exhaustive multiple searches of the site, the last just before this column was posted, found no mention of the Bonds’ court decision. The list of 30 “news stories,” however, included three about the site’s new “statcast.”
I found a lengthy (1,200-word) Associated Press report on the ruling on ESPN.com.