To judge by my email, a fair number of readers are wondering why I haven’t had anything to say about the investigation into baseball’s steroids crisis, headed by Senator George Mitchell, that Commissioner Bud Selig announced recently.

The reason is simple: I’m not a public relations shill for Major League Baseball. If they want this farce promoted in this newspaper, they can buy an advertisement. Mitchell is a director of the Boston Red Sox and a chairman of Disney, which owns ESPN, an MLB broadcast partner. Further, he has no credentials whatever that suggest he knows anything about performance enhancing drugs. There’s no reason not to believe the whole thing is a sham meant to find some scapegoats for MLB’s willful blindness, which lasted decades, to the impact of steroids on the game.

The chief scapegoat, one suspects, will be Barry Bonds, who’s off to a fairly miserable start to the season. Entering play yesterday, he was hitting .167 with no home runs or RBI in five games, results many would like to brandish as proof that with baseball’s new drug testing regime in place and Bonds presumably deprived of the drugs that, according to various credible reports, fueled the greatest run of offensive seasons in the game’s long history, he’s done as a ballplayer.

It would be a happy outcome for MLB if Bonds were unable to play and thusly unable to break Hank Aaron’s record for career home runs. While it seems for all the world as if they’re getting ready to sacrifice him to appease the angry mob, if he would just go away it would doubtless be an even better outcome.

It’s difficult to extricate Bonds the ballplayer from all the public relations, politics, race politics, and other idiocy that surrounds him, but it’s worth a try. After all, while the Reverend Jesse Jackson probably isn’t too concerned about it, many of us care about Bonds mainly because he’s the most important player in what will almost certainly be an incredibly tight race in the National League West, and care about his crummy batting statistics not because they shed some light on his alleged use of cow steroids, but because they might give us a clue as to how that race is going to turn out.

The stats point to an inarguable truth: Bonds looks done. Yes, he’s drawn seven walks and scored four runs, but if he literally can’t hit the ball, even Bonds’s batting eye isn’t going to make him a productive player. The problem is his right knee, the same one that needed several operations last year, complications from which kept him out from playing until September.

Somewhat insanely, given the amount of coverage the man has received, I don’t think fans (and even most baseball pundits) realize how grave the problem was. Bonds has nothing in his knee but bone. An infection in the knee last year caused bacteria to eat everything else away. That’s bad enough for anyone, but for a a 41-year-old ballplayer, it’s the end of the line.

A major league hitter depends on his legs more than anything else. The force with which he hits the ball is generated from rapid, explosive movement in his hips and torso, which in turn rely on a stable base, with around 60% of the player’s weight balanced on his lead foot, the rest balanced on the back foot. Bonds is a left-handed hitter who weighs somewhere in the neighborhood of 230 pounds, and he’s resting all that weight on a knee that doesn’t really allow him to walk all that well. If his bat looks slow, that’s because it is slow; he can’t generate the force he’s used to generating. He’s trying to break 110 mph in a car with blown front tires.

Bonds isn’t going to hit .167 the rest of the season, but my strong suspicion is that he’s basically finished as a great player. He can’t run, he can’t field, he can only play so often, and he’s probably not going to be able generate the kind of power he did even last fall more than sporadically. This is what a lot of people were expecting to see this spring; the bad start is a confirmation of suspicions, not something that’s causing people to reassess their positions.

The horrible thing is that given how charged everything associated with Bonds is, if he comes out tomorrow, says, “I just can’t do it anymore,” and retires, the witless commissioner and his crony are going to get the credit for it; if he stays in the game and goes for the records, he’s going to be turned into the exemplar of the systematic corruption of the game and offered up as a human sacrifice.

This may be an example of a guilty man being framed, or something of the sort, but it’s a sad outcome nonetheless. At least it couldn’t happen to a nicer guy.

tmarchman@nysun.com