No one will, or should, have all that much sympathy for Barry Bonds. Yesterday in San Francisco, the best hitter in baseball history was indicted on four counts of perjury and one count of obstruction of justice, and if convicted, will face up to 30 years in prison. The charges are unsurprising. They’re also absurd.

In December 2003, Bonds was called before a federal grand jury investigating the Bay Area Laboratory Co-Operative (Balco), which sold illegal drugs to athletes. Like Gary Sheffield, Jason Giambi, and other athletes, Bonds was granted immunity in exchange for his testimony. He, therefore, had no reason to do anything other than tell the truth. And yet, it is alleged he not only lied, but lied magnificently, brazenly, and shamelessly. When shown a positive steroid test for a “Barry B,” he pleaded ignorance, as he did when he was shown a schedule for drug use marked “BB.” (“He could know other BBs.”) He denied ever knowingly taking steroids; he denied ever talking to trainer Greg Anderson about human growth hormone, and he claimed he mistook an anabolic steroid for flaxseed oil.

By now, there is no point rehearsing the arguments for Bonds’s guilt — anyone who has not been convinced by now ever will be. No one who has read the best reporting on the subject (such as last year’s “Game of Shadows,” the devastating investigation into Bonds’s relationship with Balco written by San Francisco Chronicle reporters Mark Fainaru-Wada and Lance Williams) can possibly think Bonds has any credibility. He clearly used drugs and clearly did so knowingly, and when he claimed otherwise before the grand jury, he was clearly lying. The physical and circumstantial evidence is too overwhelming to mount a defense that doesn’t sound like it’s being issued, I think, from the midst of a cloud of smoke in a dormitory room. Apologists for Bonds sound like undergraduates asking, “How can we ever really know anything is true, man?”

What yesterday’s indictment put at issue isn’t Bonds’s guilt, but whether prosecutors ought to have filed the charges, and the related question of whether or not they came down on Bonds essentially because he is a ballplayer. Neither question is as easily dismissed as one might think.

For all his fame as baseball’s all-time home run champion, Bonds is a marginal figure, and was testifying in a marginal case. He is alleged to have lied about doing something that harmed no one and should be legal. Yes, the powerful should be held to account when they seek to corrupt justice. But Bonds is not especially powerful, and he wasn’t seeking to subvert justice in any broad meaningful sense.

This, by itself, wouldn’t necessarily argue against prosecution, but the nature of the case would. The specific lies Bonds is charged with telling are, according to a standard of common sense, exceptionally arrogant — but they’re also going to be hard to disprove legally. All of them relate in one way or another to what Bonds actually knew about the drugs he was taking, and what sorts of conversations he had with Anderson, who was released from jail yesterday after spending nearly a year there for refusing to testify against Bonds.

In the absence of a tape-recorded, cartoon villain speech from Bonds proving that he knew he was taking steroids and growth hormone, it is going to be very difficult to prove beyond any reasonable doubt that Bonds knowingly took drugs. And as Anderson’s lawyer says he is still not cooperating, it will be impossible to prove that Bonds and Anderson had conversations that both men say they did not have. This will not be an open and shut case.

If this is a potentially difficult and essentially meaningless case, it’s hard to see why it should be prosecuted. After all, if Bonds were a crack user who denied smoking crack, while testifying before a grand jury weighing an indictment against a crack dealer, no one would care. What separates Bonds is that he’s famous. Any claims that this prosecution is justified as a means of showing that the powerful are held to the same laws as the powerless are laughable: Bonds is no captain of industry or war profiteer or cigar-smoking machine boss. He’s not even especially wealthy, by Bay Area standards.

Not only do I understand the impulse to laugh at Bonds’s disgrace, but I share it. Still, there’s no reason to pretend this looks like anything other than a badly conceived public relations ploy on the part of a Department of Justice that, in my opinion, has absolutely no credibility with anyone not directly employed by it. If prosecutors were interested in justice, rather than making an example out of a laughingstock and salvaging an expensive drugs investigation that served absolutely no purpose, they would have been contented by the fact that Bonds’s lies have already ruined his reputation.

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One thing should be noted about reports that Alex Rodriguez is about to sign a contract that will pay him more money if he breaks Bonds’s home run record. Under the terms of the sport’s collective bargaining agreement, players cannot be paid based on performance-based incentives. This is a good idea: Players should not be swinging for the fences in bunting situations because they get paid $10,000 per home run. Why anyone associated with the Yankees would be anonymously crowing to newspapers and the wire services about a contract that they cannot, in fact, sign is a question perhaps best left to the reader’s imagination.

tmarchman@nysun.com