The local boy is taking some hits from the press out West. The Barry Bonds buzz by the bay says that the San Francisco Giants front office, which includes general manager and Concord native Brian Sabean, looked the other way when it came to Bonds's alleged steroid abuse the past few years.

The Giants were winning. Tickets sales were brisk. Monstrous home runs by Bonds were sailing out of SBC Park and into McCovey Cove.

Why confront the issue? Why confront Bonds? Why rock the boat?

"At best they're enablers to Bonds, and at worst they're co-conspirators,"San Jose Mercury Newscolumnist Tim Kawakami said by phone yesterday. "The ownership was lock, stock and barrel behind him."

Bonds, as I'm sure you've heard, is the subject of a new book called Game of Shadows, written by a pair of investigative reporters for the San Francisco Chronicle. Authors Mark Fainaru-Wada and Lance Williams lay out a chronology of steroid abuse through an abundance of documentation and on-the-record sources.

Bonds, they contend, was jealous when the country had a love affair in 1998 with Cardinals slugger Mark McGwire, who broke Roger Maris's single-season home run record that season.

Maris hit 61 in 1961. McGwire finished with 70.

Bonds, the story goes, began to use steroids, illegal without a prescription, supplied to him by his personal trainer, Greg Anderson.

Bonds Zoom

By spring training 1999, Bonds was huge. He'd gained 15 pounds of muscle in a short period of time, and as the next century moved forward, he got bigger and bigger and bigger.

He then turned the baseball world upside down in 2001, just as McGwire had done three years earlier, belting an amazing 73 homers.

While Bonds was amassing incredible statistics through the early 2000s, he received preferential treatment from the Giants. Most notably, Anderson, long rumored to be a drug dealer, was given trips to spring training and access to the Giants clubhouse. He was, in a sense, part of the team's staff, because that's what Barry wanted.

And what Barry wanted, Barry got.

Meanwhile, the steroid controversy was bubbling. McGwire and Sammy Sosa looked and sounded guilty when they testified in front of Congress last year. And while Rafael Palmeiro declared that day that he'd never taken steroids, he later tested positive and was suspended.

Prior to that, Bonds was linked to Anderson and Anderson was linked to Victor Conte of the Bay Area Laboratory Co-Operative, known as BALCO, who confessed to distributing steroids to top athletes, including Bonds.

So everybody knew, or figured, that Bonds was cheating.

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