BOB KLAPISCH Griffey's homers help us forget BALCO and Bonds

Only the most blackhearted soul could've turned away from the purest, feel-good moment of the 2004 season.
Ken Griffey's 500th career home run against the Cardinals on Sunday was the oasis we need in this BALCO era. As he toured the bases, no one asked if Griffey had juiced his way into the history books.
Those homers have been honest, from 1 to 500, and the only question is: How many more can he hit?
Actually, at age 34, the greatest mystery today is how close Junior would've been to 600 or even 700 homers had his career not been shredded by injuries. Griffey hit more homers in the Nineties than either Barry Bonds or Sammy Sosa, and went into the 2000 season with 398.
Do the math, and you understand the three-year curse. Griffey has spent a total of 261 games on the disabled list, while Bonds and Sosa, as thick as WWF wrestlers, have turned themselves into long-ball champions of our era.
But maybe that's changing now, even as Bonds is on his way to catching Babe Ruth and eventually passing Hank Aaron's all-time home run record.
Questions abound
The road to baseball immortality still has to go through the BALCO investigation, and it's no small development that Victor Conte, the man who's under indictment for distributing steroids to Bay Area athletes, sent a letter to the White House recently. He's looking to cut a deal.
That may or may not be good news for Bonds and his 676 homers. Same goes for Sosa and his 549. Both men are entitled to the presumption of innocence, but as Conte moves closer to the feds, BALCO breathes heavily on baseball's neck. That is, except for those who are clean. Like Griffey.
He reached No. 500 with the same precision as the first 499 -- a roll of the wrists, a perfect weight shift from his back leg, a complete rotation of his hips followed by the subtle uppercut that left-handed power hitters are blessed with. Griffey was never inhumanly strong -- in fact, he has an ordinary physique compared to Bonds and Sosa -- but he's nevertheless a walking advertisement that home runs are less about muscles than timing.
No one suggests Griffey is blemish-free; he's had his own dark moments of bitterness and anger at the world since 2001.
Still, Junior's integrity has never been questioned. He's never been summoned before a grand jury, like Bonds or Jason Giambi. There are no canceled checks that link Junior to BALCO, like the one that might point to Gary Sheffield.
Of course, it's possible the feds will come up empty-handed, and that Bonds, Giambi, and Sheffield will be able to demand -- and receive -- an apology from the steroid police. For baseball's sake, we hope so.
Nice moment
But in the meantime, it's a gift not to have to wonder if Griffey's homers were hatched in some laboratory. Even the way No. 500 was celebrated at Busch Stadium in St. Louis spoke to its purity.
The ball was retrieved by Mark Crummley, a 19-year-old Cardinals' fan who according to memorabilia experts could've sold it for between $50,000-$75,000. Instead of profiting from his good fortune, the kid simply returned the ball to Griffey.
"It just didn't seem right to sit there and plea-bargain with him over his baseball," Crummley told The Cincinnati Enquirer. "It means a lot more to him than me so I just gave it back to him."
As a show of thanks, Griffey invited Crummley to the Reds' clubhouse, where several of the Reds went out of their way to shake the teen-ager's hand. Crummley was given three autographed bats, some hats, the jersey Griffey was wearing at the time he hit No. 500, and a glove.
Reds' first baseman Sean Casey was moved enough to call Crummley a "great kid," and said the gracious exchange between him and Griffey proved "there are still some good people that have some character out there."
Dumb comments
Bonds, meanwhile, was busy, too, trying to break out of a minislump that's left him homerless in his last six games. That might explain why Bonds was in a particularly irrational mood the other day, telling The Boston Globe he would never consider playing in Beantown because the city was "too racist."
Bonds went on to admit he had no first-hand knowledge of race relations in the city; he simply spoke without thinking, right from his self-absorbed core.
Maybe Bonds doesn't realize that 46 percent of Boston's population is non-white.
Or, that if life were truly that awful for African-American athletes, Ellis Burks never would have re-signed with the Red Sox this year. Bonds is an unparalleled hitting talent, but his politics are impossible to understand, much less condone.
What Bonds has going for him is numbers. No doubt he's crushed Griffey, who, even if he remains injury-free, will be hard-pressed to ever reach 700 homers.
Junior has every right to remember those missing 261 games with bitterness, but if he's s lucky, he'll look at No. 500 as a gift -- one bestowed upon just 19 other hitters in the history of the game.
Those homers are actually Griffey's gift to America, too. From 1 to 500, every single one of them is BALCO-free.
XBob Klapisch is a sports columnist with the The Record in Bergen County, N.J.