OK, it's been a while and I apologize for the delay. Things have been hectic.

And look at what's happened in my absence. Maybe the biggest sports and tech story ever -- Bonds, Giambi, 'roids, Bush and McCain -- blows up all over the place. That'll teach me a lesson -- never move again!

So, people are asking me, Transition Game, what do you make of all this? So I'll tell you -- I don't really know. OK, well I do, but my thoughts on this are complicated, so let me go through them.

First of all, I am a baseball romantic -- not in the baseball-is-a-metaphor-for-life way of George Will, but just in the sense that I love the game, love stats, and love comparing athletes and teams over time. Comparing records set and broken is a part of that, so you might expect me to be peeved to no end at Barry Bonds. But I'm not, and here's why.

A very good source of mine at the US Department of Justice alerted me many many months ago that the feds had the dirt on Bonds and other players that they used prohibited substances. At the time, even though I suspected players like Bonds might have been juiced, I was a little taken aback. But over time, as the realization sunk in, I found that I just didn't care that much. In fact, this last baseball season, I was interested in seeing Bonds above all players -- maybe in part because I knew he was or at least had been using banned substances.

Barry has been called a "freak" and other nasty things by critics. But I didn't see him that way. Look at him and watch him play. He's absolutely the most compelling thing at the plate in the game today. And knowing he was taking creams and clears didn't diminish any of that for me.

So what about the "integrity of the game" and all that? Well, the critics have a point. As your parents used to say, rules are rules. These guys were breaking them, etc. Fair point.

But maybe we need to rethink the prohibition on some of the banned substances. See here and here for more on that (but see here for an excellent piece on why taking roids is bad for the game). Matt Welch at Reason has an absolutely must-read article on the Bonds take-down by the feds. If you read nothing else on this subject, read that piece.

I keep coming back the same point I've made before -- the only way to get juice out of the game is for the players to want it out of the game. But if steroids, when properly administered, aren't terribly bad for you, and if fans want better and better performance, where're the incentives pushing players, especially older players who want to stay in top shape?

Lastly, no matter what one thinks of the players using banned substances, the leak of supposedly sealed grand jury testimony is bad. Very very very very bad. And the widespread abuse of our criminal justice system should be a much bigger concern to people than player abuse of their bodies or fan trust.