After all, it has all the necessary ingredients -- sex (a jilted mistress), drugs (performance-enhancing steroids) and an overbearing, condescending professional athlete with his personals caught in the proverbial vise.

Outside of the Bay Area, Bonds is so loathed, he apparently has lost even his constitutional rights. A San Francisco judge last week denied the bid of Bonds' attorneys to thwart the book's authors from profiting from the publishing of "illegally obtained grand jury transcripts."

But sooner or later, the book, too, is likely to lose its fastball. By then, Bonds, never in a hurry at the plate, will have passed Babe Ruth in homers and be taking aim at Hank Aaron.

He isn't likely to be suspended, but that's not because commissioner Bud Selig can't build a substantial circumstantial case against Bonds. Rather, Selig would be opening baseball's equivalent of Pandora's Box.

No one is demanding that Giambi's stats be whisked from the record books or that he give back his 2000 MVP award. And you haven't read any investigative stories locally, have you, about how exactly Palmeiro tested positive for stanozolol?

At the risk of being branded a Bonds apologist, let me remind that the soon-to-be home-run king has never failed a Major League Baseball drug test, which is the same as never being arrested by Barney Fife. The three primary named sources in the new Bonds book are two convicted felons and the outfielder's scorned mistress.

Recall how the whole BALCO mess started. Gold medal sprinter Marion Jones changed coaches. The former coach sent a syringe laced with an undetectable steroid, THG, to a Raleigh, N.C., reporter, who forwarded the evidence to the U.S. Anti-Doping Association. Reverse-engineered in the USADA lab, THG became detectable. All roads soon led to Conte.

But on the last day of the coming season, there is still the likelihood that the game's new all-time HR king will be a roundly suspected cheater.

One of Bonds' biggest blunders was that he took it too far. His home-run total expanded like his alleged cap size. His detractors now want each of his homers asterisked to look like sacrifice bunts.

The case against Bonds repeatedly rails against his increased production after he reached the age of 35. Pitcher Roger Clemens, meanwhile, has won four of his seven Cy Young Awards after turning 35. Clemens, for some reason, remains above public suspicion.

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