Mike Lupica: It's getting hot in here

New York Daily News

Sunday, June 24th 2007, 4:00 AM


We could have had an emotional reunion of two of the BALCO All-Stars this weekend in San Francisco if Jason Giambi, who has gotten hurt a lot over the last few years, hadn't gotten hurt again - a bad foot this time - and ended up on the disabled list. Surely there would have been a fantastic photo opportunity of Giambi and Barry Bonds on the field during batting practice, maybe the two big guys giving each other a big hug.

But Giambi wasn't there. Gary Sheffield, another of the BALCO All-Stars, is an ex-Yankee, now swinging for the fences and doing a real good job of it with the Tigers. So it is Bonds against the Yankees all by himself, and Giambi against the world right now.

Giambi is the one who gets clipped for steroids finally, not in front of the BALCO grand jury, but in the place Looie Carnesecca always called Macy's window. Giambi is the one who admits to steroid use, Giambi who agrees, under duress, to speak with former Sen. George Mitchell, even though no one knows what kind of answers he will actually give to Mitchell.

Baseball gets Giambi for now.

It doesn't get Bonds, at least not yet.

But July has a chance to be one of the most unusual and dramatic months in baseball history. Not because Bonds keeps getting closer to the great Henry Aaron's all-time home run record. Because Scott Schools, the interim U.S. Attorney in San Francisco and the one who has inherited the Bonds case from Kevin Ryan - one of the U.S. attorneys whose firing has put Attorney General Alberto Gonzales' job in jeopardy - has to make a decision next month on whether to indict Bonds or drop the case against him.

Either way, Bonds might not yet be in the clear, and as always, we're not talking about the kind of steroid “clear” you can rub all over your body and think it's flaxseed oil.

Bud Selig was prepared to suspend Giambi, who finally admitted to steroid use in a newspaper interview, even if he called it “stuff,” if he did not become the first active player to cooperate with Sen. Mitchell. It is almost impossible to believe that he won't do the same to Bonds if Bonds gets indicted for perjury.

What becomes almost as interesting is this: Bonds doesn't get indicted, Schools calls off the grand jury, and baseball doesn't have to steer clear - that word again - of Bonds because he is not under federal investigation any longer.

Is it impossible to believe that Selig doesn't then throw the book at Bonds - the book in this case being “Game of Shadows” by Mark Fainaru-Wada and Lance Williams with its meticulous and ferocious detailing of Bonds' steroid use, a book where the word “alleged” does not appear - and tell him that he is the next one in Giambi's seat across from George Mitchell, or else?

You can say now that Bonds won't do it, even if Selig is prepared to suspend him. Nobody thought Giambi would sit down with Mitchell, either, not even after he said what he said in USA Today.

This isn't over with Bonds yet, as much as people want it to be, as much as people still want this to be about race and not illegal drugs. Bonds is the godson of Willie Mays, who came along four years after Jackie Robinson and became one of the most celebrated and admired players of all time, hitting 660 home runs in the big leagues, doing that at a size that now makes Willie Mays look small as a jockey when he stands next to the modern medical marvel that is Bonds.

Bonds is a black American trying to break the record of a black American and somehow we are supposed to believe that it is because he is a black American.

We are also supposed to believe Fainaru-Wada and Lance Williams made it all up. Five people have been convicted in BALCO and one of them is Bonds' former personal trainer, Greg Anderson, who currently follows his guy's pursuit of Aaron from a jail cell.

Bonds could break Henry Aaron's record in July. He could get indicted. He could get suspended. There have been other home run chases. Not like this. Not where the guy giving chase is getting chased himself, by a U.S. Attorney and by the commissioner of baseball.

Still.