Not being a San Francisco Giants fan, it’s hard for me to think of any particular reason to be upset that Barry Bonds may miss this entire season with a knee injury – if that is what’s going on. It’s hard to tell from his bizarre, incoherent ramblings yesterday. Listening to what Bonds had to say, you would have thought he was announcing his retirement due to hounding from newspapermen rather than a setback in rehabilitation from relatively minor off-season surgery.

“You wanted me to jump off the bridge, I finally have jumped,” he told the press yesterday. “You wanted to bring me down, you’ve finally brought me and my family down. Finally done it. From everybody, all of you. So now go pick a different person. I’m done.”

What is he talking about? Who can say? More importantly, who cares?

Life must not be very much fun for Barry Bonds right now. If the winter’s reports that he told a federal grand jury that he believed steroids and other illegal performance enhancing drugs he was taking were actually flaxseed oil are accurate, he may well be charged with perjury.

Whatever one thinks of steroids or the government devoting resources to investigating their use by ballplayers, perjury is a serious crime, and the astonishingly hubristic and insulting nature of Bonds’s claims were an open invitation for investigation. Claiming you mistook THG for flaxseed oil isn’t just ordinary, self-exculpatory lying; it’s sticking your fist out to the world, slowly extending your middle finger, and waving it back and forth in front of everyone’s face.

Kimberly Bell, a woman who says she’s Bonds’s former mistress, claims she testified before the grand jury last week about how Bonds told her he was using steroids and gave her large bundles of cash earned at memorabilia shows with instructions to deposit them into special bank accounts. It’s speculation at this point, but there seems to be at least a chance that Bonds is facing investigations into tax evasion and perjury, as well as into steroid use.

On the one hand, none of this is a very big deal. Bonds’s alleged sins aren’t really any different from those of, say, a bartender in Islip who occasionally smokes marijuana, underreports his tips to the IRS, and calmly tells a traffic judge he was unaware he was going 80. Even if everything people say about him is true, it doesn’t make him a bad person, just an ordinary one with all the flaws of other ordinary people. He’s not Pete Rose.

On the other hand, it really is time for Bonds to just go away. I wouldn’t go so far as to say he’s a disgrace to the game; but he certainly is an embarrassment. I’m not of the camp that thinks Bonds should have the home run record taken away from him if he’s proved to have used steroids; it’s an absurd idea. Record books are meant merely to reflect concrete facts, not to interpret them.

But it would still be a huge relief if Bonds fails to break that record. Does anyone really need to read a thousand self-righteous columns, listen to a million self-righteous talk-show callers, or get into pointless barstool arguments with belligerent drunks over Barry Bonds and his swollen head finally becoming the all-time home run king? Does anyone want to hear people who haven’t watched baseball since Nellie Fox was the MVP of the American League blathering on about “what this says about our win-at-any-cost society?” And most of all, does anyone really want to see a delusional megalomaniac with a martyr complex gloating over records he cheated to secure?

Bonds is the best player I’ve ever seen or will ever see, steroids or no, and there’s something perversely admirable about his deranged ambition not merely to be one of the greatest of all time, but to be the greatest, fullstop. It’s the ultimate expression of what drives every athlete and indeed every competitive person, and it’s been a privilege to watch. That he cheated doesn’t really change that – it taints his achievements, but not the drive that enabled them.

Somewhere, though, he seems to have forgotten that greatness really is about more than achievements and numbers. It’s not hard to understand why – every record he’s broken has been more incontrovertible proof to throw in the faces of the doubters and haters and enemies he apparently, to judge by his public statements, sees all around him. And maybe he’s been justified in that – long before anyone mentioned steroids in connection with his name, Bonds was the most vilified ballplayer of his generation, largely based on nothing more offensive than arrogance.

Even so, true greatness also has to do with common decency, humility, and courage. I find more to admire in Rickey Henderson’s absolute refusal to retire and in Roberto Alomar’s acceptance that his time had come than I do in Bonds’s willingness to pay any price to break the home run record. Bonds’s legacy is what it is, whether he ever plays another game or not.

He was a cheater; he was as great a baseball player as anyone ever was, and that wasn’t enough for him; and unlike men like Henry Aaron, whose record he may still break, his greatness never transcended the game.

Aaron’s chase after Babe Ruth is a contemporary myth, less about home runs than about a black man’s struggle against injustice and the weight of America’s segregated past. If Bonds’s chase becomes as mythic, it will be for all the wrong reasons. It will not be about justice but about the price of overwhelming ambition and hubris.