Lisa Olson

The hundreds of pages of court documents unsealed Wednesday paint a pretty grim picture for Barry Bonds. There are positive drug tests linked to the home run king, transcripts of a taped conversation between Bonds' personal trainer/fall guy and Bonds' former personal assistant/government snitch discussing -- at Bonds' locker in the Pac Bell clubhouse! -- what appears to be the slugger's use of an undetectable steroid, and a list of current and former major leaguers scheduled to testify at Bonds' March trial.

Bonds' lawyers will be back at U.S. District Court in San Francisco Thursday, arguing that much of the evidence is either hearsay or inadmissible. They will move to suppress 24 drug tests (including four positive steroid tests they will argue can't be conclusively linked to Bonds because of flaws in how they were processed), dozens of drug calendars and laboratory log sheets, opinion evidence from doctors and scientists, and witness descriptions of Bonds' "physical, behavioral and emotional characteristics."

Bonds' lawyers do not want the jury hearing from his former girlfriend Kimberly Bell and others about the acne on his back, his shrinking testicles, the size of his head, hat, hands and feet or anything about his sexual behavior.

A tale that began with a tip that there might be something illegal to be found in the trash cans near a Burlingame, Calif., office complex is nearing its zenith (or, it could be reasonably argued, its nadir), and the government is convinced it will end with Bonds being led away in handcuffs. But how many others will Bonds take down with him?

The same question can be hurled at Roger Clemens: is your ego so large, is your narcissism so deep and your world so clouded by decades of sense of entitlement and delusions of grandeur, that nobody is safe? Not your wives, your mistresses, your employees, your relatives, your employee's relatives, your teammates, your teammates' wives and mistresses and relatives ... the degrees of separation are as thin as a subpoena. Just ask Madeleine Gestas, who is the mother of the woman married to Greg Anderson, the trainer who served two stints in prison for refusing to testify against Bonds. Last month, 20 FBI and IRS agents raided Gestas' house, ostensibly because she and her daughter are the target of a tax investigation.

And she wasn't even one of President Obama's cabinet picks.

Bonds, the home run king and seven-time NL MVP, is expected to plead not guilty Thursday to a grand jury's third indictment. Remember, he is being charged with lying and obstruction of justice, not with shooting his body full of illegal drugs designed to enhance his performance and increase the circumference of his skull. Clemens, a seven-time Cy Young Award winner, is next in the box, as federal prosecutors move closer to indicting him for lying under oath to Congress when he told members of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee last year he had never used steroids or human growth hormone and thought the bat was a ball. (OK, Mike Piazza added the last allegation).

Despite the common myth that baseball didn't ban steroids until 2003, commissioner Fay Vincent in 1991 specifically included steroids in the policy that prohibited the use of prescription drugs without a legitimate 'script. Steroids and growth hormone are illegal for citizens to use without a doctor's prescription, and the last time we checked, professional athletes had to abide by the same laws as the rest of us. So, please, stop with the argument that Clemens and Bonds and all the rest of th em weren't doing anything illegal. Bud Selig, the owners and the players' association knew what was going on -- every kid on the playground could have told them -- and it's their eternal shame that rampant cheating occurred on their watch.

But though the government's case against Bonds (and presumably, Clemens) is bound to be filled with gritty details of who shot whom with what illegal substance in what body part (folds in the stomach seem to be the spot of choice, followed by the meat of the buttocks), it's really far more basic and dull. Did Bonds lie to a grand jury in 2003 when he said he never knowingly used performance-enhancing drugs? Did Clemens lie to Congress about the same subject? If citizens are allowed to lie to grand juries and Congressional hearings, what's the point of having laws?

While Bonds and Clemens spend millions on lawyers and advisors, they might be wise to add Martha Stewart as a consultant. Stewart went from celebrity homemaker to inmate number 55170-054 after she was convicted of obstruction of justice and lying to federal investigators about her sale of stock in a biotechnology company. As Yogi Berra might say, its not the crime, it's the covering up that kills you.

The unveiling Wednesday of the government's evidence offered fresh insight into Bonds' hubris. He once dared the feds to come get him and now they have, using his own urine tests to illustrate he tested positive for steroids four times in drug screenings conducted between 2000 and 2003. One test performed by BALCO, the laboratory at the center of the investigation, found the steroid methenolone in Bonds' urine, while two other tests found traces of the steroid nandrolone, according to the prosecutors' filing.

Bonds also provided samples to MLB during its 2003 survey testing program -- a program which was later proven to be bogus, as players often were tipped off to testing dates and told their samples would be destroyed. These samples were analyzed again by the UCLA Olympic lab and found to contain THC, a designer drug once considered undetectable, and Clomiphene, a female fertility drug favored by body-builders. Bonds never failed a MLB steroid test; he acknowledged to the grand jury investigating BALCO that he used a "clear" substance and a "cream" substance provided by his personal trainer Anderson, but Bonds said he believed he was using flaxseed oil and an arthritis balm.

The government's mound of evidence suggests Bonds knew exactly what he was putting in and on his body. Calendars and handwritten notes seized from Anderson's home "provide a detailed record of steroid distribution from Anderson to Bonds from 2001 to 2003," the prosecutors' filing said. Some of the calendars are said to have the initials BB and BLB (Bonds' middle name is Lamar) printed on them, and appear to coincide with the San Francisco Giants' schedule.

It's also clear the government plans to call as witnesses some of Bonds' teammates and peers, including Jason and Jeremy Giambi, who already testified to the grand jury about their own extensive use of steroids and illegal PEDs. A source close to Jason Giambi says Giambi had no direct knowledge of Bonds' alleged use of steroids, but Bobby Estalella, a teammate of Bonds from 2000-2001, is expected to testify that he had firsthand knowledge "that Bonds knew what he was doing when he used steroids," according to an ESPN.com report.

The myth and romance about the sanctity of the clubhouse will get torn to shreds once the Feds get their claws around it. It's a nasty, dirty tug-of-war, filled with shady chemists and spurned business partners and lovers and teammates who might have been complicit or clueless. Watch Andy Pettitte get muddied again as he's dragged into the perjury investigation of Clemens, his former friend and teammate. We're only in the early innings of Clemens' investigation, and already there are reports that Brian McNamee, Clemens' former personal trainer, just so happened to keep in his basement for years boxes of syringes, needles and bloody gauze used when he injected Clemens. McNamee gave the waste to federal investigators, to determine if it contains traces of Clemens' DNA.

Again, it's no longer about the preciousness of baseball records, or keeping sport clean and fair. If Bonds and Clemens had told the truth and asked for forgiveness -- and in this court of public opinion, the truth was long ago exposed -- FBI and IRS agents could go about raiding the houses of other tax evaders and people who obstruct justice. It's not as if America is experiencing a shortage of them. Bonds and Clemens would be free men, forgiven for ingesting the same illegal substances as many of their peers.

Now, anyone who had intimate knowledge of Bonds or Clemens during their glory days ought to have an attorney on call, just in case.