For my own little private protest during Barry Bonds' inevitable passing of Babe Ruth on the all-time home run list, I read "Game of Shadows," the Bonds-blasting steroid scandal book written by San Francisco Chronicle investigative reporters Mark Fainaru-Wada and Lance Williams.

Appropriately, I finished the book on the same day Bonds hit career home run No. 715 this past Sunday.

The culmination of neither event left me feeling particularly exhilarated.

Despite the enormity of hitting more home runs than the great Babe Ruth, I find it impossible to celebrate Bonds' fete in light of the preponderance of evidence that suggests he's a deceiver and liar concerning his alleged use of steroids and other performance-enhancing drugs. His drug use alone I could handle, since steroids were not banned from baseball when he supposedly began using them, and because I can see him feeling some justification because the preponderance of evidence also suggests that any number of fellow longball hitters he was trying to out-longball, notably Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa, did likewise.

But it's his apparent inability to tell the truth that makes Bonds a dirty-rotten scoundrel in my book.

By the same token, I have a similar problem with the authors of "Game of Shadows," who in their book so ably present the doping case against not just Bonds but a number of other high-profile athletes.

Fainaru-Wada and Williams don't come across as honesty and integrity personified, either.

Their expose rests largely on the publication of grand jury testimony that is supposed to be secret.

The reporters, along with others at the San Francisco Chronicle, were recipients of leaks of the grand jury proceedings and had no qualms about going public with the information despite the fact it's against the law.

Theirs is the usual fourth estate excuse: The public has a right to know, and if they didn't print it, someone else would.

In other words, as Barry Bonds might say if he could ever find it within himself to muster the truth, sometimes mitigating circumstances make breaking the law justifiable.

Forget the fact that people who testified in front of the grand jury were promised confidentiality or that future grand juries could face problems because it turns out secret testimony isn't really very secret.

The conundrum, of course, is that neither the Chronicle nor Bonds are likely to ever be punished for their lawlessness.

Bonds will use his high-priced lawyers to beat any raps, just as the Chronicle will use its high-priced lawyers to protect its sources and beat any raps.

And yet, in a weird, symbiotic sort of way, the system worked: The reporters got to write what they knew and Bonds got "convicted" in a well-written, hard-to-argue-with-the-facts book. I'd be interested to hear from anyone who reads "Game of Shadows" and comes away not convinced that Bonds — or Gary Sheffield or Jason Giambi or Marion Jones or Tim Montgomery, etc. — used performance-enhancing drugs provided by the BALCO lab in San Francisco.

So the cheaters got exposed by cheaters.

What a world.

---

Lee Benson's column runs Sunday, Monday, Wednesday and Friday. Please send e-mail to benson@desnews.com and faxes to 801-237-2527.