America At Large: It seemed at first blush that the Balco probe might have netted all sorts of minnows while allowing the biggest predatory fish, namely Barry Bonds and Marion Jones, to dog-paddle away undisturbed; but a certain self-correcting karma seems to have settled in to restore balance to the sporting universe, writes George Kimball

Neither the man who fancied himself the greatest baseball player in the history of the game nor the woman who was putatively the fastest on earth was ever charged in the scandal which brought down so many of their colleagues. While both were tarnished by a mountain of testimony and a preponderance of circumstantial evidence, they steadfastly maintained their innocence, and in the end the baseball commissioner, the US Anti-Doping Agency, and the United States government decided they probably didn't have enough for a conviction and let them both walk.

On the other hand, once Victor Conte's designer concoction "The Clear", aka THG (tetrahydrogestrinone), was removed from the realm of "undetectable" steroids, Bonds and Jones have been not unlike the Wizard of Oz without his curtain and smoke machine.

Jones, having bombed out at the Athens Games, briefly assayed a drug-free comeback on the track circuit last year. She finished last in a field of six at the Mount San Antonio Relays, fourth in the 100 metres in a meet in Mexico, and then withdrew before her heat in the US Championships, effectively ending her competitive career.

With Major League Baseball's drug-testing policy in force, Bonds sat out nearly all of the 2005 season before returning to the line-up this year. In three weeks of play this season, Bonds is batting an anaemic .192 with exactly zero home runs.

On the other hand, the feds, having struck out when the Balco grand jury failed to indict Bonds (or Jones), appear to be turning the thumbscrews again. Yet another federal grand jury has been empanelled, and is reviewing whether Bonds should now be indicted for having committed perjury in the earlier probe by proclaiming his innocence.

This latest threat has brought unexpected support for Bonds from Bay Area journalists, who could not in the past have been described as exactly in Barry's corner.

"Even if Bonds provably lied about a material fact to a federal grand jury in December 2003, and even if another grand jury is contemplating a perjury indictment, can you say that Bonds should be indicted, prosecuted and possibly imprisoned for it?" asked Tim Kawakami in the San Jose Mercury-News this past Monday.

"No, he should not," Kawakami answered his own question. "There is a line between fair prosecution and overzealousness, and this crosses it."

Then Kawakami's colleague Ann Killion got exercised because several people without steroid blood on their hands, including the San Francisco Giants' respected trainer Stan Conte (who is most emphatically unrelated to Balco chief Victor), have been subpoenaed in the latest investigation. (Stan Conte, by all reasonable accounts, was kept in the dark by Bonds' inner circle while he worked with his subsequently- convicted "personal trainer", Greg Anderson.)

Kawakami's objection, on the other hand, is that since Victor Conte, the mastermind of the whole enterprise, did only four months in prison, Anderson three, and that no other Balco- implicated athlete saw the inside of a cell, it now smacks of a witch-hunt to be going after Barry.

Here's what they're both forgetting: every prominent sportsman - from sprinter Tim Montgomery to NFL linebacker Bill Romanowski to the Yankees' Jason Giambi to Bonds and Jones - hauled before the Balco grand jury received the same deal. They were granted immunity from prosecution over anything and everything - save perjury. No one could be prosecuted for anything they offered up in testimony, as long as they told the truth.

And for many that truth was costly.

Whether Barry Bonds is going off to the sneezer for perjury or merely about to self-destruct in his post-steroid form, he may have even bigger worries. Almost lost between the cracks in the waning days of the Balco investigation was the testimony of the baseball player's former mistress, Kimberly Bell.

Bell provided evidence that Bonds had financed their relationship largely by cash payments, money he had earned at memorabilia shows and the like, since his $17 million salary was audited not only by the Internal Revenue Service, but also by his wife.

Mrs Bonds is presumably all too aware of that relationship by now. So, alas, is the IRS. Students of American history may recall that they never managed to convict Al Capone of bootlegging or murder. When the feds finally put Al in Alcatraz, it was for income tax evasion. The thought of the same fate befalling the drug cheat Barry Bonds is almost too delicious to contemplate.