The ladies over at Babes Love Baseball (a site I find myself linking to and reading more and more by the way) have an interesting post on whether there really is collusion to keep Barry Bonds out of baseball.

Although the MLBPA has launched an investigation and could even take up a labor complaint on Bonds’ behalf, I doubt whether he would even support such a fight and when you actually look at the definition of collusion from a legal sense, there is no doubt that teams could make the argument that Bonds simply is not the player he once was and his salary demands are too high.

“Collusion is an agreement, usually secretive, which occurs between two or more persons to deceive, mislead, or defraud others of legal rights, or to obtain an objective forbidden by law typically involving fraud or gaining an unfair advantage and can involve “wage fixing, kickbacks, or misrepresenting the independence of the relationship between the colluding parties”

Like everything else in law, the defense to a charge is generally found within the definition of the charge itself. The key word here is an “agreement” whether written, verbal or otherwise (even a wink and a nod are supposed to count) and that is where an argument by Bonds or the MLBPA would fall down. It is obvious that General Managers are staying away from Bonds, of that there is no doubt but there is also no doubt that a collusion charge could never stick. There has been no agreement made and any GM could simply cite any number of reasons why they have chosen not to go out and make an offer to the Home Run King.

The ladies perhaps sum it up best when they say:

“Common sense tells us that teams without a proper designated hitter or left fielder probably can’t afford one. Since Bonds isn’t willing to play for the league minimum, we have ourselves a conundrum. Common sense also tells us that Bonds is older than dirt, injury prone, and chock full of drama.”

Oh ya and the fact that he was just indited ten more times doesn’t exactly help his case.