So far this season, with one or two exceptions, the big baseball story has been the nonstory. The standings, with the exception of the Philadelphia Phillies’ presence at the bottom of the National League East, already look more or less exactly as everyone predicted they would coming out of spring training. The best individual performers, like Alex Rodriguez, have generally surprised no one who was paying attention. Usually, the game is in a state of suspense in mid-April, waiting for the actual outlines of a campaign to emerge from the hot and cold streaks. This year, it’s more like summer with bad weather.

The most unusual and noteworthy non-story, though, is the big one, to which everyone is already paying attention — Barry Bonds’s chase of Hank Aaron’s career home runs record. Bonds, who turns 42 in July, has hit four home runs through his team’s first 14 games, and is hitting .306 BA/.458 OBA/.694 SLG overall. Barring an acute injury, which is certainly possible at his age, he’s going to break the record in June. He might well lead the league in home runs.

It says a lot about how complex Bonds’s story has become that the fact that he remains, at 41, perhaps the best hitter in baseball isn’t even a particularly notable aspect of it at this point. Bonds’s relationship to Aaron, his relationship to federal investigators who have been looking into his tax records, and his relationship to the drug-scandal commission headed by Senator Mitchell have all overwhelmed his chase for Aaron’s record, let alone his role as the left fielder for the San Francisco Giants, and perhaps rightly so. Still, it’s worth putting what Bonds is doing in perspective, because we’ve never seen anything even remotely like it before.

Right now, Bonds is on pace to hit 46 home runs. That assumes that he’ll play at the pace he’s been playing so far this year and take the field in about 140 games, which seems reasonable given that he played 130 last year. The total number of seasons in which a player 41 or older has played that many games is eight. In three of those, the player was primarily a designated hitter; Pete Rose accounts for two more, and Honus Wagner, Rabbit Maranville, and Luke Appling each had one season in which they played that much. The mere fact that Bonds is capable of fulltime play is, in its own right, an extremely unusual achievement.

To return to those 46 home runs, though, consider this: In the entire history of baseball, 21 players have hit 10 or more home runs from the age of 41 onward. The career record for the most home runs hit after that age is held by Carlton Fisk, who from the time he was 41 until his retirement four years later hit 53. Bonds actually has an outside chance of hitting that many this year. He’s hit 30 home runs since last year, in 541 at-bats; it took Fisk 1,713 at-bats to hit his home runs.

What’s most remarkable about Bonds right now is that he isn’t limping to the finish line. Aaron, as much as I hate to admit it, did. In his last two seasons he was no longer even an average player. Rose was probably the worst player in baseball for a few years before he broke Ty Cobb’s career hits record. Rickey Henderson was, like Aaron, more a marginal major leaguer than a Rose-style embarrassment by the time he broke the all-time runs record, but he, too, was really just hanging on in baseball. Bonds is still as good as anyone you’d care to name, at an age when being able to play the game as anything but a reserve and a quasi-coach is nearly unprecedented.

This should all be very plain and obvious, and yet it somehow isn’t. There is so much scandal and controversy surrounding Bonds, and his team is so mediocre, that he’s simply ceased to be relevant as an actual baseball player. It takes a bit of focused attention to remember that we’re basically talking about Ted Williams with Hendersonclass athleticism, or Willie Mays with a worse throwing arm and a better batting eye.

Talent on that scale, controversy aside, creates its own context, in which nothing seems unusual, something that is in the end probably a bigger factor than Bonds’s shadiness or the relative indifference with which his most impressive accomplishments are being met. If we take what Bonds is doing for granted, it’s also probably true that we’ve also taken Roger Clemens, who’s 10 times the pitcher Nolan Ryan was, a bit for granted, and Alex Rodriguez, too, and all for similar reasons. We all have a frame within which we can process what a player is doing; when a player goes too far outside that frame, it’s easy to simply disregard it. We’ll see how baseball handles Bonds’s crowing moment the day he breaks Aaron’s record. Personally, I’ll be at least as impressed by his presence in left field as I will be by number 756.

tmarchman@nysun.com