JT the Brick

I’m trying hard to shine an intense spotlight on Barry Bonds as he is about to break the most important record in baseball history, but I'm getting more frustrated with each passing day. I believe Bonds has stained baseball by taking illegal performance-enhancing drugs, and those have helped him play at a high level well past the prime of his career so that he could eventually break Hank Aaron's all-time home run record.

But I feel that I'm one of the few sports talk hosts in America who bothers to talk about this issue each day. I talk about Bonds each hour on my four-hour nightly broadcast and never run out of opinions on why Bonds should be punished for his crime against America's pastime. I can write until I'm blue in the face about Bonds' relationship with BALCO and his longtime friend and trainer Greg Anderson, who sits in jail because of his loyalty to Barry.

I read the book “Game of Shadows” more than once and believe that Bonds clearly knew what he was putting in his body and should have easily been able to quote you the specifics of what was in “the clear and the cream.” I do not believe that he thought he was only applying an arthritic rub when he was smashing 73 home runs to break the single-season record. My 5-year-old son gets homework assignments in kindergarten that are more difficult than the process of connecting Bonds to Victor Conte and BALCO.

That being said, Bonds and his crack legal team have done a great job protecting his image and getting us to move on from this steroid controversy. Throughout the 2005 baseball season, Bonds couldn't go anywhere in San Francisco — let alone the rest of the country — without being stalked by reporters and wondering what new story would come out each night that would further embarrass him and his family.

Today, Bonds seems to be enjoying a new sense of privacy. The national media seems to be on vacation when it comes to covering his pursuit of 755, much less the steroid scandal. There are no stories about the scandal, and former Senator George Mitchell's investigation (which was supposed to be concluded long ago) appears to have stalled. Instead we read about a few minor leaguers who tested positive for illegal performance-enhancing drugs or assistant clubhouse attendants who might have been steroid gofers for a select few unnamed players.

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Every day, I go on line to read the San Francisco Chronicle and other top sports pages, only to find articles about everything other than Bonds. I read more about Daisuke Matsuzaka of the Boston Red Sox or Steve Nash and the Phoenix Suns and even Jeff Gordon and NASCAR, but nothing about Bonds, unless he hit a homer the night before. Why is this? Has Barry escaped the baseball roadblocks that were set up by the media and fans the past three years?

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Why can’t any member of the news media get an interview with Bud Selig in the next month and get him to comment on the record about Bonds before he achieves this great milestone? Bonds certainly isn't saying anything. Who could blame him? Other than a few thousand hard-core fans in New York, Philadelphia, Los Angeles and Boston, baseball fans who enjoyed grilling the Giants star about his alleged steroid abuse just a few years ago have moved on. Am I the only fan that wants the Bonds topic to be the lead story on TODAY and “Meet the Press”?

Let’s get Larry King and Oprah to adjust their schedules and invite Bonds and his attorneys to address this matter. Even David Letterman and Jay Leno should instruct their comedy writers to get back to the “Barroid” jokes and make him feel the heat as he draws closer to the home-run title.