Pujols goes to bat for Bonds

~ The Cardinals star is helping the beleagured slugger with both words and his bat.

It's no secret Barry Bonds doesn't have a lot of friends in baseball. Ask him the names of his teammates on the San Francisco Giants, and he might be lucky to guess half of them.

He does know who Albert Pujols is, though. He even seems to like the guy.

Turns out it's a mutual admiration thing. When he's not hitting home runs, Pujols likes to watch the Bonds soap opera play out on the soon-to-be-defunct "Bonds on Bonds."

The other night in San Francisco, Pujols went so far as to lecture reporters about dragging Bonds down.

"You still need to see the ball and hit it," Pujols said. "I get so angry with you guys wiping the floor with his name. The guy hasn't done anything and you're wiping the floor with his name."

Apparently Pujols has more of an understanding of the strike zone than he has of the BALCO investigation. Remember, it was Bonds himself admitted using steroids -- though he says he did it unknowingly -- when he testified before a grand jury, and another grand jury is investigating whether he didn't fess up fully.

Then again, Pujols gets paid to hit home runs, not read grand jury testimony.

What's interesting here isn't so much that Pujols is defending Bonds, because players have an unwritten code (one David Wells apparently didn't hear about) that they protect each other at all costs.

More interesting is that Pujols may end up doing a lot for Bonds this season. Not with his mouth, but with his bat.

Pujols is already taking some of the heat off Bonds by putting up numbers that even the best juiced players of their time couldn't reach. He hit a record 14 home runs in April and now has 23 in 47 games.

Imagine -- and the way Pujols is hitting home runs it doesn't take much imagination -- if some time in late September the Cardinal slugger steps up to the plate at the new Busch stadium and hits home run No. 74.

He'll do it in a year when Major League Baseball players are being tested for steroids. And he'll do it in the same city where just eight years earlier Mark McGwire broke the mark of 61 held by Roger Maris.

Baseball won't just have a new single season home run king. It will have reason to celebrate like never before, with the stench of the steroid scandal pushed aside by a slugger who did it without the cream or the clear.

Bonds would have reason to do a little celebrating of his own, assuming the federal grand jury hasn't gotten him by then.

Bonds can point to Pujols as evidence that human beings can hit more than 70 home runs a season in an era of small ballparks and overstretched pitching staffs. He can argue that, like Pujols, he has never tested positive for steroids and that he was clean when he hit 73 home runs in 2001.

And without lab reports from BALCO and with Victor Conte Jr. saying he never gave Bonds anything, who is going to prove him wrong?

Maybe Bonds was thinking along those lines when the Cardinals came to town this week and the center of attention shifted from his 714 home runs to the pace Pujols is on this young season.

"I love it!" Bonds said. "I hope he shatters it."

Any slugger these days is suspect, of course, and there are already those who whisper that Pujols is older than he says he is and that he must have bulked up on something to be able to hit line drives out of the park the way he does.

It's true that baseball is testing for steroids, but it's also true it is an imperfect system. And there is no testing at all for human growth hormone, which is said to be the best performance-enhancing aid of them all.

The real truth is, no one knows what is real in baseball or any other sport anymore. So maybe Pujols has a right to get angry, as he did the other night, when Bonds is linked to steroids and the natural inference is that Pujols must be using something, too.

Life works in funny ways. If Bonds began juicing around the turn of the century, as alleged in the book "Game of Shadows," it certainly wasn't with Pujols in mind because Pujols was an unknown just trying to make the St. Louis roster.

Bonds, the book says, was trying to catch McGwire and Sammy Sosa, who were hitting everything out of the park.

Now McGwire and Sosa are out of baseball, their home run marks tainted by suspicions that more than just corked bats and tightly wound balls were responsible. Bonds is struggling and has been scorned and mocked by fans around the league.

Pujols, meanwhile, is on a pace to hit some 80 home runs this year, a feat that would have been unimaginable until recent years.

Bonds says he'll be rooting him on, and he just might be telling the truth.

The record may help Bonds sell more memorabilia. But having Pujols break it would be even better.

It will help Bonds sell his story.

Tim Dahlberg is a national sports columnist for The Associated Press. Write to him at tdahlbergap.org