America at Large:A week from next Tuesday Major League Baseball will take a hiatus from its pennant races to stage the 2007 All-Star Game at San Francisco's AT&T Park. While no members of the hometown Giants appear likely to be voted onto the starting line-up, tradition decrees the American and National League squads include at least one player from each team.
There is a growing groundswell of sentiment to designate as the Giants' representative to the Midsummer Classic the most reviled man in baseball - Barry Bonds.
Fortunately for Bud Selig, the head-in-the-sand Baseball Commissioner, that won't be his call. As the manager of the defending NL champions, Cardinals' Tony LaRussa will have to fill out the roster with players not voted in by the fans or the players, and the man who managed Mark McGwire in his drug-fuelled assault on the single-season home run record nine years ago is scarcely in a position to claim the moral high ground in denying Bonds a spot before his hometown fans.
Selig, in the meantime, faces an even more nettlesome dilemma. As of yesterday morning, Bonds had drawn within six home runs of Hank Aaron's all-time record, 755, and seems likely to surpass the sanctified mark before the summer is out - if he is still an active player by then.
Selig is undoubtedly hoping a federal grand jury meeting in the Bay Area will indict Bonds for perjury sometime in the next month, which would allow him to suspend the Giants' slugger.
Otherwise he may find himself forced by circumstances to be present for the record-breaking moment, joining in celebration of an historic accomplishment every man, woman, and child in the country will know to have been fraudulently obtained.
In the meantime Selig, under pressure from disgruntled fans (and an even more disgruntled Congress) to do something about baseball's steroid mess, has turned his attention not to Bonds but to the Yankees' Jason Giambi.
Giambi has emerged this summer as that sporting rarity - a stand-up drug cheat.
Last month, in a soul-baring interview with USA Today, Giambi all but confessed, admitting that he "was wrong for doing that stuff," and challenged the movers and shakers of the sport by acknowledging that "what we should have done a long time ago was stand up - players, owners, everybody - and said: 'We made a mistake.' We should have apologised back then and made sure we had a rule in place and gone forward . . . Steroids and all of that was a part of history. But it was a topic that everybody wanted to avoid. Nobody wanted to talk about it."
Nothing Giambi said should have shocked either his employers or Major League Baseball. During the negotiations that led to his 7-year, $120-million contract with the Yankees six years ago, Giambi's agent specifically requested that all language referring to steroids be stricken from the document. The Yankees complied.
In a 2003 testimony before an earlier edition of the Balco grand jury, Giambi admitted to having used both steroids and HGH (human growth hormone), and when his admission was leaked a year later (first in the San Francisco Chronicle and then in Chronicle reporters Lance Williams and Mark Fainaru-Wada's book Game of Shadows) the Yankees explored the possibility of voiding his contract, and Selig considered disciplinary action.
Neither happened due to two complicating factors. One, Giambi had testified under a grant of immunity from prosecution. The other was grand jury testimony is, by definition, supposed to be secret. So instead of going after Giambi then, the authorities tried to put Williams and Fainaru-Wada in jail.
Baseball's so-called "Steroid Era" essentially coincides with the Bud Selig era, so in early 2005, with the threat of a congressional investigation that might have stripped MLB of its time-honoured antitrust exemption, the commissioner attempted to get Washington to call off the dogs by placing one of their own in charge of an independent investigation.
Former senator George Mitchell, highly regarded for his earlier involvement with the Northern Ireland peace process, was appointed to head up an in-house probe into the subject of performance-enhancing drugs in baseball.
Mitchell shortly discovered what Selig must have known when he dispatched him on this fool's errand. His hands were tied at every turn by cumbersome union restrictions which allowed him virtually no contact with any active player. Players Association executive director Donald Fehr instructed players to give Mitchell's Steroid Patrol a wide berth; 15 months (and $30 million) after starting his probe, Mitchell has yet to interview one active major league player.
Until now.
Selig, the commissioner who keeps hoping Barry Bonds will disappear, has decided to go instead after the whistle-blower. In the wake of his public admission to USA Today, Selig summoned Giambi and told him he had two choices: Either the commissioner could suspend him outright, or he could meet with Mitchell and tell him everything he knows.
The meeting will take place sometime next month. Maybe it will occur around the All-Star break, perhaps even the same day Barry Bonds takes the field representing the National League. On the other hand, since Giambi is currently on the disabled list while he collects his $24 million 2007 salary, perhaps there's no rush.
Giambi has already promised he will "be candid about my past history regarding steroids". Still, even that isn't really the point of the exercise. By bludgeoning Giambi into the room with George Mitchell, Selig can turn to the congressional guests at the big All-Star Game next month and say: "See, fellows, I am trying."
