"Barry Bonds is in a suit and tie again, in a Northern California courtroom again, the outfit people wear and the place people go when they've run out of people to lie to.

He is surrounded by lawyers again, the company people keep when they've run out of people to lie to.

It's sad, really.

Sad that a man must dress up for and salary people in order for them to believe in him, when at age 46 he must consider the dilemma of accountability for the first time, and then in the harshest of lights.

I think of Bonds no differently than I do Bobby Estalella, former journeyman catcher and key witness in USA vs. Bonds, or any of their morally, ethically and legally challenged brethren.

Hit 14 home runs in a season (as Estalella once did as Bonds' teammate) or hit 73, barely climb out of the minor leagues or stand on a stage in a meadow in upstate New York, buy Winstrol in the gym locker room or have your confidante obtain The Cream in the lobby of BALCO headquarters, it's all the same.

The government, and baseball, obviously feels otherwise. Hide behind your self-entitlement long enough, swing a sword of brazenness wildly enough, and pretty soon people start digging through your supplier's garbage, friends stop going to jail for you and Hall of Fame votes slow to a trickle.

So they pick a jury – a couple nurses, a shipping clerk, a college student, an IT manager, a phlebotomist, half a dozen more – and they carve out a month for a trial and they lay out four counts of lying to a grand jury and another for obstruction. And they push forward with what began more than eight years ago as a vague suspicion and mushroomed into baseball's greatest crisis of credibility since ballplayers were throwing games. And the feds waggle their .900 conviction rate in matters such as these, which is good but still .151 less than Bonds' career OPS. And Bonds himself resumes his role as the symbolic villain for a time of thieves and cheats and other liars.

And you wonder if any of it means squat.

No, it probably doesn't.

A segment of the public believes the stories of Bonds, Roger Clemens (his turn comes in July), Mark McGwire, Sammy Sosa and the rest were underhanded and over-reported. The rest, it seems, has tired of the process, the speculation, the on-high soliloquies and low-blow opinions.

The shared opinion of 12 civilians in a San Francisco jury box, charged with determining not whether Bonds used performance-enhancing drugs but whether he lied about using them, won't change any of it."