>Mark Purdy: Bobby Bonds is dragged into the muck at son’s perjury trial

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At heart, the Barry Bonds perjury trial is still a baseball story about a man and his legacy. And I regret to report that the story has taken a reprehensible turn for the creepy in regard to one of the best San Francisco Giants ever.

I’m not talking about Barry Bonds. I’m talking about his father, Bobby. He died of cancer in 2003. But his ghost is floating in a very unseemly manner through the 19th-floor courtroom of the San Francisco federal building.

Bobby Bonds was a fantastic ballplayer who conquered his alcohol demons to become an excellent hitting coach for the Giants and other major league teams. I knew him some. Not well. I was around him enough to be certain that Bobby would be saddened and disgusted by this week’s events on the 19th floor of the federal courthouse in San Francisco.

It all began with the government’s opening statement. Prosecutors flashed the jury a visual slide on a large screen. The slide was a picture of Barry Bonds posing for a supplement advertisement with two other men — his personal trainer, Greg Anderson, and BALCO chief Victor Conte, who masterminded his company’s steroid-distribution scheme.

Bonds’ attorney, Allen Ruby, quickly tried to counter that image. Ruby used his own opening statement to explain that Bonds had posed for the picture only because Conte had been “kind” to Bobby Bonds while he battled his terminal illness. Conte had provided protein supplements and other holistic supplements to Bobby. Supposedly, Barry just wanted to do Conte a favor.

As Ruby quoted Barry: “I didn’t get paid for it or anything.”

(Yes, that definitely sounds like Barry. Of course, if Conte was providing discount steroids to Anderson as the government maintains, that could be another reason for such a picture.)

And guess what? Apparently, one dubious mention of Bobby Bonds was not enough. Because on Wednesday morning, a star defense witness also used Bobby as the rationale for a questionable act.

This happened when Steve Hoskins, Bonds’ former business partner and friend, took the stand. Hoskins brought along a digital audio recording. Voices on the recording were muffled. But they documented a 2003 discussion between Hoskins and Anderson in the home clubhouse at AT&T Park.

Slime drips off the two men’s conversation. At one point, Hoskins mentions to Anderson that too many steroid injections in the same spot can create a painful cyst and asks if that’s “why Barry didn’t just shoot it in his butt all the time.”

“Oh no, I never just go there,” Anderson replies. “I move it all over the place.”

(Feel free to dream up your own ugly vision of that.)

Before the audio was played in court, Hoskins was asked why he would ever choose to make such a recording — and he claimed that it was done for the benefit of Bobby Bonds. During the 2000 season, Hoskins said, he had warned Bobby of his son’s steroid use. But Bobby didn’t believe it after getting denials from Barry and Anderson.

More than two seasons later, Hoskins said, he took the next step of secretly recording Anderson’s words regarding the injections in the hope this would finally convince Bobby of Barry’s drug use.

“I was hoping Bobby would be the one that could get Barry to stop doing it,” Hoskins said.

So what happened, you ask, when Bobby did hear the recording? He never heard it, Hoskins said. Right about then, Bobby became very ill during his cancer treatment. Hoskins did not want to toss another troublesome element into Bobby’s fight against the disease that would claim his life a few months later.

Hoskins’ testimony was later shaken by Ruby, who asked a series of questions meant to draw the inference that a nasty business dispute with Barry Bonds was the real reason Hoskins made the recording. The jury will have to decide if that’s correct.

But as I watched the whole scene, my thought was this: It is beyond pathetic that Bobby Bonds’ memory is being utilized as legal backfill this week. Barry is using his dad’s death as an excuse for hanging out with Conte and Anderson. Hoskins is using Bobby as an excuse for making his secret audiotape.

Why couldn’t both guys just man up and admit the likely truth? Bonds posed for the picture because he liked what BALCO was doing for him far more than what BALCO was doing for his dad. And Hoskins made the audio recording because he wanted to have some evidence he could use against Bonds, just in case.

I don’t know how this trial will turn out. I do know that Bobby Bonds’ ghost deserves better. Much better.

>Bonds’ personal trainer jailed after refusing to testify against him

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The second day of Barry Bonds’ perjury trial gets underway Wednesday in a San Francisco courtroom.

Prosecutors will try to convince a jury of eight women and four men that Bonds knew his trainer was giving him illegal steroids and that he lied about it to a grand jury in December 2003.

The trial, which is expected to last three or four weeks, is taking place less than two miles from the ballpark where Bonds, 46, broke Hank Aaron’s major league home run record in August 2007. At the time, he played for the San Francisco Giants.

On Tuesday, Bonds’ personal trainer refused to testify against the baseball home run king, prompting the judge to order the trainer held in custody until he changes his mind.

Federal prosecutors called Gary Anderson as the first witness. Anderson, flanked by lawyer Mark Geragos, told the judge he would not testify,

“It’s very important that you testify so that the whole truth can come out in this trial,” U.S. District Judge Susan Illston told Anderson, as she found him in civil contempt.

Geragos said he would immediately appeal the judge’s decision to send Anderson to jail on the grounds that he was not given a fair hearing.

Anderson has already served several months in prison for previously refusing to testify against Bonds before grand juries in 2006. He also was sentenced to three months in prison after pleading guilty in 2005 to illegally possessing anabolic steroids with the intent to distribute.

“He doesn’t trust the prosecution,” Geragos said of Anderson. “He will never cooperate with these guys.”

Three months after Bonds broke Aaron’s home run record, he was indicted on four counts of lying to a grand jury about his use of performance-enhancing drugs during the federal investigation of steroids use by athletes. He also faces one count of obstruction of justice.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Matthew Parrella told jurors that a urine sample given by Bonds in the summer of 2003, just months before his grand jury testimony, tested positive for anabolic steroids.

Defense lawyer Allen Ruby, in his opening statement, told jurors that Bonds acknowledged to the grand jury that he used the substances known as “the clear and the cream,” but at the time of his testimony even investigators didn’t know what was in it.

Bonds told the grand jury he thought Anderson was giving flax seed oil, Ruby said.

“Barry answered every question, he told the truth, he did his best and, most significantly, he provided the grand jury with useful information which supported the indictment that they later returned against the BALCO defendants,” Ruby said, referring to the Bay Area Laboratory Cooperative.

The witness list includes Bonds’ ex-girlfriend Kimberly Bell, who will testify that Bonds told her he was taking steroids prior to the 2000 Major League Baseball season, according to the prosecution.

“Ms. Bell will further testify to personal observations regarding changes in the defendant’s body during the period of time beginning in the year 1999, including bloating, acne on the shoulders and back, hair loss, sexual dysfunction, and testicular shrinkage,” the prosecution’s description of its witnesses said. “She will also testify about changes in the defendant’s temperament, including an increase in angry, threatening, controlling, and violent behavior.”

Several former teammates and friends are also on the witness list to testify for the prosecution.

Ruby, in his opening statement, attacked the former friends who are expected to be called as key prosecution witnesses.

“The bitterness of these people toward Barry that surfaced around the time of the breakup, was very pervasive, very strong,” Ruby said.These witnesses “cooperated with the media as anonymous sources on many of the poisonous things about Barry,” he said. “They have tried to create a caricature of Barry Bonds, a terrible guy, always bad, mean and so on.”

A former IRS agent who fished through the trash at BALCO every week for a year testified Tuesday afternoon that a magazine clipping he found in the garbage bin led him to Barry Bonds as a witness in his investigation.

The article, which included a photo of Bonds with BALCO chief Victor Conte and Anderson, indicated that Bonds “was using their services,” investigator Jeff Novitzky testified.

Bonds holds the major league record for home runs with 762 in his 21-year career. He also set the record for most home runs in a single season in 2001 when he hit 73 balls out of the park.

Bonds did not officially retire after he was indicted, but he never played another game.