CHEATING IS CHEATING, NO MATTER WHO YOU ARE.

Byline: KEVIN MODESTI

Barry Bonds cheated to become Babe Ruth, the greatest of all time. Jason Grimsley cheated to become Jason Grimsley, seasonal employee.

Those are the allegations in baseball's performance-enhancing-drug scandal, which seems to be getting bigger and smaller at the same time. Stand the charges side by side, and you notice something you never anticipated.

In what Bonds is accused of doing, there turns out to be a certain charm.

If only compared to what Grimsley is accused of doing.

Maybe my ears deceived me after a couple of mornings of World Cup sleep deprivation, but Iswear I heard an ESPN talking head suggest Sunday it's ``hard to condemn'' Grimsley, since the result of his drug abuse is that he has banked $10 million in major-league paychecks and now ``his family is set.''

I suppose, by the same logic, it would be hard to condemn bank robbers, either.

Except that there's a certain flair about bank robbers, who at least set their standards high.

Not so with Jason Alan Grimsley, a man with the perfect name for a small-time crook.

Bonds, it appears, used steroids because he was jealous of Mark McGwire's and Sammy Sosa's 1998home-run record chase getting all the attention and wanted to produce statistical evidence that he was the best in the game.

Grimsley, it's understood, has admitted to federal investigators that he used steroids, amphetamines and human growth hormone because he was frustrated by a drop to the minor leagues in 1997-98 and wanted to get back to the bigs.

Thus was the baseball world treated to the mirage of Bonds' 73-homer season and the unusual late-career power surge that recently sent him past Ruth's 714-homer mark.

Thus was the baseball world treated to eight more seasons of Grimsley, during which the one-time Angel bounced around to the fifth, sixth, seventh and eighth franchises of his career and recorded a 24-33 record.

Why does it feel like Bonds is a little less despicable than Grimsley?

Maybe it's the same reason they make ``Oceans Eleven'' and its sequels about smooth operators robbing casinos and museums, not about guys in ski masks sticking up the Rite-Aid.

Bonds had the audacity to cheat on the grandest possible scale, the arrogance to mess with baseball's hallowed record book. Grimsley cheated at the bottom of the roster, knowing he otherwise couldn't beat out the kids in the Yankees, Royals, Orioles and Diamondbacks organizations for those middle-relief jobs.

That game is up, the 38-year-old right-hander having been released by Arizona last week after federal agents raided his Scottsdale, Ariz., home and secured his cooperation in the steroids investigation. Now he's fighting with the D-Backs over the balance of this season's $825,000 salary, which management intends to withhold.

You get the impression that if Grimsley were a spy, he'd sneak into CIA headquarters in order to sneak a peek at the coffeemaker instruction manual.

That if he were an assassin, he'd shoot the king to take His Highness' parking spot. And that if he were a Hollywood two-timer, he'd skip out on Jennifer Aniston and run off with Rosie O'Donnell.

Before this, Jason Grimsley was best known as the teammate who crawled into the Comiskey Park umpires' room through the ceiling in 1994 to replace Albert Belle's corked bat with a clean one.

That's unless you know him best for his 35 games in an Angels uniform in 1996, during which he went 5-7 with a 6.68 ERA, leading to the minor-league odyssey that inspired (too lofty a word) his drug use.

The guy has pitched all or part of 15 major-league seasons and recorded more wins than losses in four of them.

The Grimsley case reminds us that performance-enhancing drugs don't only turn stars into superstars. Sometimes they turn bowling-alley attendants into bullpen mediocrities.

None of this is meant to say there's anything noble in what Bonds is said to have done. Cheating is cheating, no matter who you are.

In fact, the worst thing about what Grimsley is said to have done is that the news has deflected some heat away from Bonds. If Grimsley is portrayed as a lovable mug who just wanted to hang on to every boy's dream, then Bonds apologists will have more ammunition to argue their man is being singled out for condemnation.

The D-Backs have put Grimsley where he belongs, on the least-wanted list.

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Photo:

Former Arizona Diamondbacks pitcher Jason Grimsley is in the middle of a performance-enhancing drug scandal.

Roy Dabner/Associated Press