Barry Bonds Baseball Career is Now Over

Barry Bonds was let go by the San Francisco Giants at the end of the season and will not be signed by anyone else after the announcement of an indictment:

Baseball superstar Barry Bonds was charged Thursday with perjury and obstruction of justice for allegedly lying when he said he did not use performance-enhancing drugs.

The indictment, unsealed Thursday by federal prosecutors in San Francisco, is the culmination of a four-year federal probe into whether he lied under oath to a grand jury investigating steroid use by elite athletes.

The indictment comes three months after the 43-year-old Bonds, one of the biggest names in professional sports, passed Hank Aaron to become baseball's career home run leader, his sport's most hallowed record.

Bonds, who parted ways with the San Francisco Giants at the end of last season and has yet to sign with another team, also holds the game's single-season home run record of 73.

While Bonds was chasing Aaron amid the adulation of San Franciscans and the scorn of baseball fans almost everywhere else, due to his notoriously prickly personality and nagging steroid allegations, a grand jury quietly worked behind closed doors to put the finishing touches on the long-rumored indictment.

Bond was pretty much untouchable even before the indictment, but now he's radioactive. He'll never again wear the uniform of a major leaguer and will eventually be little more than an asterisk in the record books.

UPDATE: I didn't think about this when I originally wrote the post but normally a home run champ would be a shoe-in for the Hall of Fame. I'm afraid Bonds will find himself in the same position as Pete Rose (though Rose was never accused of performance-enhancing drugs). There's no way the sportswriters will vote Bonds into the Hall with the whole drug thing hanging over him.