The real cast of ‘Shadows’

It’s unlikely you’ve ever heard of Rob Garibaldi.

Once a high school All-America baseball player, Garibaldi had hoped to attract college baseball scouts from the nation’s best programs.

His body, however, was a liability at 5-foot-11 and 150 pounds.

Just before the summer of 1997, as a freshman at Santa Rosa (Calif.) Junior College, he began taking steroids to bulk up and shorten his recovery time between visits to the weight room. Injecting himself with the powerful steroids Deca-Durabolin and Sustanon for the next five years, Garibaldi gained 15 pounds of muscle, hit .459 with 14 home runs and 77 RBI, was named the state’s Community College Player of the Year and accepted a scholarship to the University of Southern California.

Garibaldi helped the Trojans to the 2000 College World Series. Baseball America named him one of the top 100 college players.

But over the next 18 months, Garibaldi became violent, delusional and despondent from what his parents concluded was an adverse psychological reaction to steroid use. At one point, Garibaldi physically attacked his father, pinning him down and choking him.

Garibaldi admitted his steroid use to his parents in 2002, saying he simply was emulating his heroes – Barry Bonds and Mark McGwire. He explained that, in order to make it to the majors, a player had to take steroids.

Garibaldi’s erratic behavior continued.

On Oct. 1, 2002, while sitting in a parked car just around the corner from his parents’ home, Garibaldi, 24, shot himself in the head with a .357 Magnum pistol. His parents blamed the drugs for his crashing depression and death.

The Garibaldi tragedy is described in the latter half of Game of Shadows (Gotham Books). His tale is the most important reason that San Francisco Chronicle reporters Mark Fainaru-Wada and Lance Williams wrote their incredibly researched, erudite work.

It isn’t designed to expose so many world-class athletes, including Bonds, McGwire, Gary Sheffield, Marion Jones and Tim Montgomery as drug cheats, although it certainly does.

It is the hope here that the book’s long-term effect is to expose these drugs as dangerous risks to long-term health and to persuade young people from emulating those who fell into the temptation to take them.

The book’s excerpts that appeared several months ago in Sports Illustrated were a mere appetizer of what was to come. Game of Shadows is a buffet of Deca-Durabolin, Sustanon, Winstrol, Clomid and trenbolone, along with a descriptive menu of their use for maximum effect.

The work shows the inner workings of the Bay Area Laboratory Co-Operative (BALCO) and how founder Victor Conte used it as a front to distribute powerful steroids to a startling number of the world’s greatest athletes.

It also shows the cat-and-mouse game between drug enforcement agencies and steroid distributors, who constantly devise ways of hiding traces of performance-enhancing substances in a given user’s system.

Using notes written by Conte himself, leaked federal grand jury testimony and hundreds of interviews, Fainaru-Wada and Williams guide the reader through shocking and sad revelations that led to congressional hearings on baseball’s drug problems and a revived effort to purge the U.S. Olympic movement of drug cheats.

So incredibly well sourced is the work that the authors were recently subpoenaed to testify before a grand jury regarding court documents they used in writing the book. They, along with Chronicle executive editor Phil Bronstein, insist they are protected under the First Amendment.

Game of Shadows is the most important publication of its kind, primarily because of steroids’ devastating health effects and young peoples’ strong temptations to become bigger, better and mind-numbingly wealthy through chemistry.

Bonds and his fans claim the book is a simple attempt by his many detractors to undercut his baseball career that may end with Bonds as the all-time greatest home run hitter.

Rob Garibaldi’s parents would say otherwise.