First of all, the fact that a criminal defendant has claimed that he provided several baseball superstars with the juice should be taken with a grain of salt. The bigger the story he can tell in court, and the bigger the names he can bring down, the more leniency the court will grant him when it comes time for sentencing. In that sense, Barry Bonds should be given the same benefit of the doubt that Lance Armstrong was given.

Second, any lawyer who puts out a statement that his client "never knowingly" did something should be disbarred for rank incompetence, or even worse, made to practice in the field of workers comp. If an attorney is going to be that stupid, why not just put out a statement saying that there is "no controlling legal authority" to implicate your client and be done with it. Far better for Sheffield's attorney to have just kept his mouth shut, or at least said that his client will have no comment on what was or wasn't said to the Grand Jury.

Third, steroid use in baseball will be The Big Story for the next year, and will probably color how fans eventually look back at the last decade in the sport. Obviously, Bonds' single-season home run record will come into question (as will McGuire and Sosa, btw), but he has had such an impressive career that he will still be viewed as one of the all-time greats. Less fortunate will be players like Sheffield or Giambi (or Nomar, or Piazza, or any other player who gets caught up in this net), who may not have a pre-steroid portion of their career they can point to if they get implicated. Any well-sculpted ballplayer from the last fifteen years is going to be tainted by rumors of steroid use, regardless of guilt, in much the same way that the late Flo-Jo was after the 1988 Olympics. Sheffield, for example, with three consecutive MVP-candidate seasons, was just starting to put together a legitimate case for Hall of Fame consideration, which the steroid rumors may have irreparably damaged. This is a scandal the sport can ill-afford.