Season May Be Filled With Giant Problems

Has baseball heard the worst from the federal investigation into the Bay Area supplements laboratory known as BALCO?

Quietly, privately, the industry’s top officials fear they haven’t.

They are concerned that some of the game’s top players will be linked directly to steroid use either through the subpoenaed results of last year’s survey tests or testimony by the lab’s indicted operatives.

At the least, they worry that players of the Barry Bonds, Gary Sheffield and Jason Giambi stature could be appearing in the witness box when not appearing in the batter’s box, providing that some of those operatives go to trial.

One way or another, the 2004 season looms as more of a trial than usual for Bonds and his San Francisco Giants amid the uncertainty of the BALCO and steroid shadow.

The Giants, again balancing payroll with competitive promise, face the challenge of maintaining their division dominance amid another face-lift in their lineup and the microscope under which their cleanup hitter will perform.

Bonds, now 39 and the driving constant in his team’s annual makeover, faces the challenge of personal voids beyond the suspect nature of his lineup protection.

Greg Anderson, his personal trainer and childhood friend, has been indicted in the BALCO probe and banned from the clubhouse. Bobby Bonds, his father, lifelong mentor and batting coach, died last year.

No one knows for sure how BALCO will play out or how those voids will affect him in the long term.

However, Bonds has long operated in an insular and isolated fashion in the Giant clubhouse, and there’s validity to General Manager Brian Sabean’s contention that a man who has averaged 53 home runs since turning 35 is immune from “normal rules” and a “cut above, setting his own standards as a hitter.”

The evidence has been there again in March.

Smothered early by reporters probing the steroid issue and handicapped by a lower back strain, Bonds is now hitting the ball as far and frequently as ever, a cut above in more ways than one at 230 pounds and needing only two home runs to tie godfather Willie Mays for third all-time at 660.

After that? Well, this is a season that Bonds and the Giants will have to live with the cliche of one day at a time, one development at a time.

Bonds continues to reject most interview requests, insisting only that he has never used steroids.

What Sabean says requires a little reading between the lines.

In March, he can’t look too far beyond April.

“Look,” the general manager said, “Barry has faced a lot of expectations and relative adversity on the field and in his personal life.

“He also has the wisdom of age to help him get through whatever the year brings, and the fact is that the situation here is far less hectic on the inside looking out than people think it is.

“Where that all leads, what happens week to week, nobody knows. We’ll just have to let it run its course.”

Bonds was one of seven baseball players who testified before the BALCO grand jury with limited immunity that does not protect them from a perjury charge if it was determined they lied.

The seven are among a limited group of players whose 2003 test results have been subpoenaed by prosecutors who initially sought all 1,438 tests.

Prosecutors agreed to issue new subpoenas with the appreciably reduced request after talks with MLB and union officials who feared that the testing program would be destroyed by a wider breach in its anonymity and confidentiality.

Amid the uncertainty, one thing may be predictable: The Giants will find a way to be competitive.

The 2003 team won 100 games and routed the National League West with a new manager and new players at half the positions.

Three starting position players, Rich Aurilia, Benito Santiago and Jose Cruz Jr., are gone. So are substitute closer Tim Worrell and late-season rotation acquisition Sidney Ponson.

Among other considerations, scouts question if the new additions, including catcher A.J. Pierzynski, outfielders Dustan Mohr and Michael Tucker, and pitcher Brett Tomko, represent the usual caliber of the Giants’ remodeling, but it’s hard to argue with Sabean.

The Giants have won three division titles and been to the playoffs four times since he became general manager in 1997. The Atlanta Braves are the only National League team to have won more games in that span.

Addressing the perception that the Giants might not be as strong, Sabean said:

“I don’t dispute or worry about what other people think. My barometer is how the manager and the players feel, and they think they have a chance to win again. Any team that has maybe the best player in baseball, a No. 1 starter like Jason Schmidt and the experience we have is going to be a formidable opponent. I feel as confident about this team making the playoffs as I have any of our others.”

Why not? Amid widening parity and a more judicious economic approach throughout baseball, only the San Diego Padres seem significantly improved in the West.

Besides, said first baseman J.T. Snow, the Giants by now have “established a reputation and mind-set” for coping with whatever roster changes the off-season brings.

Or as center fielder Marquis Grissom, having shown the Dodgers and others in his first season with the Giants that he is still capable of being an everyday player, put it:

“We expect to play well, and that’s half the battle anyway. Changes or no changes, it doesn’t matter. There are no excuses. The nucleus is still strong, and our focus is strictly on getting back to the postseason. That’s the good thing about being here.”

Grissom may bat third in the new San Francisco lineup, with Edgardo Alfonzo fifth. The Giants can try to protect Bonds in some ways, but in others they can’t.

By the Numbers

The decision by Frank McCourt to retract his vow to acquire a hitter may have been met with displeasure among Dodger fans -- and disbelief among reporters who remembered the vow because they had written it down (as the astute Jamie McCourt pointed out that reporters are prone to do) -- but it was met with applause in the spring clubhouses of the Dodgers’ four Arizona-based division foes.

While McCourt was ignoring the division landscape and the fact that the process of improving the Dodgers’ disadvantaged offense has to start somewhere (he suggested that one hitter isn’t a panacea), Snow was saying almost the opposite.

“The division is so wide open that one or two players can make a difference,” the Giant first baseman said, “but aside from San Diego, I don’t think too many of the teams in the division have done a lot.

“Arizona added Richie Sexson but lost Curt Schilling. The Dodgers lost Kevin Brown without really adding anyone. We play each of those teams 19 times. Schilling and Brown figured to start six or seven of those games each. It helps us a lot that they won’t be making those starts.”

Anyone Home?

The goal of Commissioner Bud Selig to implement the minor league testing program of stiffer penalties and year-round testing at the major league level has been widely reported and given credence by Selig and other baseball executives, but what they don’t say is this:

The year-round, off-season phase of the minor league program is basically catch as catch can, and wouldn’t be much better if implemented at the major league level.

In the last week, I talked to five players at different camps, each of whom had spent the last two or more years at the minor league level. All said they have never been tested during the winter.

“We’re basically knocking on doors, hoping to find people home,” baseball labor lawyer Rob Manfred acknowledged of the winter program in the minors.

“We’re trying to do the best we can with it, but locating the players is one problem, and there are obviously significant legal issues involving players who live out of the country.”

In other words, baseball officials armed with passports and specimen cups can’t simply start tracking down players in Mexico, the Dominican Republic or any other foreign country, ignoring borders and the laws of those countries.

If there is not off-season testing of all players on a random basis, if even U.S. players can’t be found and tested during the off-season, what’s the point?