For those of you who like to jump-start the day with a joke, here's one I stumbled over on the Web site of the San Francisco Giants recently. It's from Paragraph 2 of a small document headed Statement from the San Francisco Giants regarding recent allegations against Barry Bonds (Volume 37):

"The San Francisco Giants are strongly opposed to the use of performance enhancing substances, including stimulants, by Major League Players."

Yeah, I was wheezing too.

Eric Risberg, Associated Press Maybe the Giants should have put more restrictions than incentives in Barry Bonds??? new contract Click photo for larger image.

These guys should be writing for Conan O'Brien.

As some of the primary enablers of baseball's still-reeking steroids muck, the Giants opened their clubhouse to a battalion of Barry Bonds' personal trainers, then looked elsewhere as the peevish outfielder and his lackeys laid the pipeline to the diabolical BALCO chemists who delivered a whole program of steroids, including those designed to avoid detection, the very substances at the root of some of the game's most historic home runs.

The official statement above got issued Jan. 11, after the New York Daily News reported that Bonds had failed an amphetamines test last summer, that he'd first blamed it on something found in the locker of teammate Mark Sweeney, and that such a positive test left him susceptible to at least six drug tests in the coming season, the one in which he intends to break the all-time home run record of one Henry Louis Aaron.

It's the feel-bad story of the year.

The club and the clubber waded reluctantly back into the news this week by finally agreeing to the specifics of a one-year contract that will bring the former blade-shaped Bucco $303,846.15 per week, provided certain conditions are met.

Obviously, you generally don't throw $15.8 million at a guy facing a perjury indictment from a federal grand jury, so the language had to include some escape for the Giants should that happen. Loathe to seem ham-handed on the player who built their ballpark, saved them from moving to Florida and sold more tickets than anyone north of Hollywood, the Giants chose to merely reference a clause in the standard player's contract, the one that says a team may terminate a contract if the player shall "fail, refuse or neglect to conform his personal conduct to the standards of good citizenship ... "

Whether Bonds actually votes or not probably shouldn't matter, and I don't know whether he votes in California or in national elections or whether he thinks Condoleezza Rice is what you get with the orange peel shrimp at P.F. Chang's, but Bonds' agent was barely out of syringe-throwing distance of AT&T Park the other day when he told The Associated Press the special language was unenforceable. The Giants got Bonds to agree not to file a grievance if he was terminated, and to agree not to have the union do that for him. They didn't, however, get the union to agree not to do so on its own.

Certain other provisions certainly should have been included in the new contract, according to my own impeccably suspect legal instincts, and they are as follows:

The Giants can terminate Bonds contract if:

1. The player reneges on an agreement to buy his own helmet, as helmets shaped like an over-inflated rugby ball must be custom-made at a debilitating cost to the club.

2. The player moves his locker room recliner to his position in left field.

3. The player implicates a teammate in anything more serious than putting paprika in his athletic supporter.

4. The player gains 3 pounds during an intentional walk.

5. The player includes on his complimentary tickets list any person with even a passing connection to Olympic weightlifting, sprinting, shot-putting, discus-throwing, synchronized sofa hauling, or anyone even vaguely connected to the Tour de France.

6. The player is overheard saying, "my compliments to the chemist."

7. The player's "strategic" leadoff bunt goes to the wall on two hops.

8. The player's media obligations are carried out in the company of the player's offspring.

9. The player's Web site includes a link to a pharmacy.

10. The player appears on the visitor's list of thrice-jailed federal prisoner and former trainer Greg Anderson.

The new contract expressly forbids two of Bonds' remaining trainers, Harvey Shields and Greg Oliver, from coming into the clubhouse. In a conference call the other night, Bonds said, "I have no problems with it; [Oliver] and Harvey will be with me, just outside the ballpark."

Translation: Screw you.

Undoubtedly, the new contract should also contain language that protects the player from any peculiar impulse on the part of a club that has had its image shredded by a star player linked to Deca-Durabolin, Winstrol, The Clear, The Cream, Clomid, Trenbolone, Modafinil and Human Growth Hormone.

Bonds, for example, should immediately get the full value of the contract if the Giants attempt anything along the line of Barry Bonds Mistress Night, or have a ceremonial first pitch delivered by reporters Lance Williams or Marc Fainaru-Wada, unless of course it's San Francisco Chronicle Night.