Barry Bonds: Testimony Focuses on Bonds' Urine Sample from 2003 Season

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Barry Bonds Trial Resumes Tuesday Following Delay

After a slight delay brought on by a sick juror on Monday, the Barry Bonds perjury trial got back on track on Tuesday.

It's hard to believe, but this is Day 10 in the effort to prove that baseball's all-time home run king knowingly took steroids right around the time he started blasting balls out of the yard at an alarming rate in the early 2000s.

The prosecution hit something of a hitch last week when Bonds' orthopedic surgeon Dr. Arthur Ting, one of their primary witnesses, denied that he and Bonds had ever discussed steroids. Needless to say, this was not good for the prosecution's case, and they sorely needed to right the ship on Tuesday.

According to ESPN, the early part of Tuesday's proceedings revolved around a 2003 urine sample from Bonds that apparently tested positive for steroids. Bonds had to provide the sample as part of Major League Baseball's initial steroids testing program, and it was subsequently seized by federal investigators in 2004 shortly after Bonds' grand jury testimony in the BALCO case.

The sample was tested by UCLA in 2006, and the prosecution called three chemists from the UCLA Olympic Analytical Laboratory to talk about how they handled and tested the sample.

This is all well and good, but the problem is not whether or not Bonds took steroids. It's whether or not he knowingly took steroids, which is something that chemistry alone cannot prove.

Instead, the prosecution needed to provide evidence from the horse's mouth, as it were, and they thought they had a chance to do just that when they came up with a tape recording that supposedly featured a conversation between Bonds and Dr. Ting that proved that the slugger did indeed know he was taking steroids.

However, U.S. District Judge Susan Illston ruled the tape to be inadmissible. She thought it was "barely intelligible" and altogether irrelevant. The jury will not get to listen to it.

When it comes to the prosecution, today is the end of the line. The defense will start their case tomorrow, and you can easily make the argument that the entire charade is already tilting in Bonds' favor. The prosecution's evidence has been weak, to say the least, and they definitely shot themselves in the foot when they decided to call Dr. Ting to the stand. Whether or not they will be able to recover from that to win one for the government is very much in doubt at this point.

Make no mistake about it, there is a pretty good chance of Bonds being let off scot-free after all this. Given the amount of time and money the government has out into their attempt to throw the proverbial book at him, that would be a colossal failure, especially when you consider that they will have failed to prove something that is pretty obvious.

Long live America and its justice system.

For more depressing baseball coverage, check out our list of The 50 Most Overrated Players in MLB History.

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