CSN: Bonds' crimes almost irrelevant now

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Sam Hurd makes Barry Bonds seems so insignificant, criminally speaking. And Bernie Fine makes him even more so, and Jerry Sandusky even more so than that.

In short, Bonds? sentencing on obstruction of justice -- a relatively lighthearted 30 days? house arrest, two years probation, 250 hours of community service, a $4000 fine -- seems an exceedingly small deal.

It isn?t, clearly. The wheels of justice moved with Molina-esque speed with Bonds, and they?re not done with its grinding, but obstruction of justice is obstruction of justice, and a felony is a felony. Barring a successful appeal by Bonds? lawyers, or a prosecution plan to retry him on the three counts that hung the jury, Bonds has this hung around his neck for as long as anyone wants to view him that way.

[RELATED: Bonds avoids jail -- two years probation, house arrest]

Oh, we forgot. There?s also been a new high-profile positive PED test, with Ryan Braun of the Milwaukee Brewers. So yeah, time keeps on spinnin?, spinnin?, into the future. And the smaller Bonds gets in the rear view mirror, the less we remember.

Nevertheless, Bonds was the finest baseball player of the last 40 years, and his conviction is a deal. It?s hard to know how much of a deal it is without delving into the mind of the person making the judgment, but it?s a deal.

It provides a new reason for outrage by his defenders, and a new reason to dismiss him as a cheating swine by his detractors. In short, the needle on his legacy hasn?t moved a single neutrino in all these years.

Only the circumstances around him have changed. And in the last couple of months, they?ve literally lurched away from him.

Sandusky is the worst of them, assuming of course that he is indeed guilty of the charges of child sex abuse brought against him. Fine?s story, equally unproven in a court of law, is nearly as horrifying, and has the added shame of having his wife Laurie linked to rumors that she slept with a number of Syracuse basketball players while her husband was a coach there. And there are claims that the former head of the AAU, Bobby Dodd (not the former football coach), also molested children.

Wednesday, though, came the Hurd story, in which he was caught in an FBI sting trying to buy four kilograms of cocaine for distribution, as part of what authorities say was a $2 million PER MONTH coke and marijuana operation in which a number of NFL players were allegedly customers.

Now how exactly does Barry Bonds getting probation and community service match up against that? It doesn?t, of course, and it isn?t meant to do so. There have always been worse crimes than Bonds allegedly lying to a grand jury to keep his alleged use of performance enhancing drugs from the authorities, and nobody has ever said otherwise.

But that?s not really the point. Mostly, what this is about is our general fatigue with the entire Bonds saga, and how much smaller that saga is now that sports has had to absorb greater and more revolting crimes.

The issue of whether his records are tainted was tired and stupid when it was a hot topic, and so is his Hall of Fame candidacy. Moralists on horses from each side have drained the flavor from those discussion points.

And that doesn?t even take into account the fact that isn?t about performance enhancing drugs as much as it is drugs that are illegal to obtain or possess without a legal prescription, or distribute for any reason. It is about the safety of those drugs, and it is about athletes self-medicating themselves with drugs of indifferent quality or safety.

This should have been a public health issue, not a record book issue. So what we really have here is an obstruction of justice charge when in the rational world we would have had charges dealing in and using dangerous and illegal substances. No athlete or athlete?s representative has been charged with that in any case, so far as we know.

But Barry Bonds is done, at least for the moment. And Jerry Sandusky and Bernie Fine and Sam Hurd are far scarier figures. And time rolls inexorably on, and Bonds seems diminished by comparison ? which should scare the hell out of everyone.

Ray Ratto is a columnist for CSNBayArea.com.

Source: http://www.csnbayarea.com/12/16/11/Recent-sports-news-far-eclipses-Bonds-/landing.html?blockID=613566&feedID=6858

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