4th player says Bonds’ trainer supplied drugs

SAN FRANCISCO â€”  Retired baseball player Randy Velarde, who last played for the Oakland Athletics, testified Wednesday that Barry Bonds’ former athletic trainer supplied him with performance-enhancing drugs and injected him during a series of parking lot meetings in 2002.

Velarde was one of four major league ballplayers called by the prosecution in an effort to prove that Bonds lied when he told a grand jury in 2003 that he did not knowingly take steroids or human growth hormone.

But Velarde and the other players have not implicated Bonds in their dealings with his athletic trainer, Greg Anderson. Anderson was put in jail last week for the duration of the trial for refusing to testify.

Velarde told the eight women and four men on the jury that Bobby Estalella, who was playing for the Yankees at the time, gave him Anderson’s telephone number in late 2001.

Velarde said he called and asked Anderson for human growth hormone. The two met several times in parking lots during spring training in Arizona in 2002, and Anderson injected him in his arm, Velarde said. He also testified that he injected himself in the abdomen with human growth hormone.

The drugs gave him “endurance, strength,� Velarde said. Asked if Anderson gave him any drug besides human growth hormone, Velarde said he was uncertain. “I just know there were injections,� he said.

Velarde followed Colorado Rockies first baseman Jason Giambi and retired players Jeremy Giambi and Marvin Benard, who testified Tuesday that Anderson gave them performance-enhancing drugs.

Estalella, a former San Francisco Giant, is the only player the prosecution has said would directly implicate Bonds. Prosecutors had said Estalella would testify about a series of conversations he had with Bonds about steroids.

But prosecutors failed to call Estalella on Wednesday, and did not include him on their list of remaining witnesses. The trial is on its eighth day and may end next week.

Bonds told a federal grand jury investigating steroid distribution in 2003 that Anderson gave him substances known as “the clear� and “the cream,� which prosecutors said were steroids. But Bonds said that Anderson told him they were flaxseed oil and arthritis cream.

Bonds, 46, has not played baseball since 2007, the year the federal government indicted him for lying under oath and the year Bonds surpassed Henry Aaron for most career home runs. Bonds’ record stands at 762 home runs.

Anderson, who served time for illegal steroid distribution, has spent nearly two years in prison, mostly for refusing to testify against Bonds, a childhood friend who became Anderson’s most famous client.

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