It is a story that relegated even the signing of David Beckham to second place on the sports networks in the United States. Barry Bonds tested positive for amphetamines last season and initially blamed it on a San Francisco Giants team-mate, according to a report in yesterday’s Daily News (New York).

The newspaper claimed that, when caught by Major League Baseball’s doping investigators, Bonds blamed it on a substance he had taken from the locker of Mark Sweeney, a team-mate. Bonds’s agent, Jeff Borris, offered “no comment”, while Sweeney’s agent, Barry Axelrod, said that his client “did not give Barry Bonds anything and there was nothing he could have given Barry Bonds”.

Bonds, one of the most famous and controversial sportsmen in the US, has lived with accusations of drug abuse for years because of his links with figures implicated in the Balco steroids distribution case and because he became a more potent hitter than ever in his mid-to-late thirties, breaking the single-season home-run record in 2001.

Various drugs allegations, largely ignored in the 1990s, when muscular sluggers were fashionable, have severely dented baseball’s credibility. Bonds is routinely booed by opposition fans and Mark McGwire, whose record Bonds broke and who is suspected of steroid use in the 1990s, when baseball had no rules against it, failed to reach the Hall of Fame this week, apparently because voters felt that he was not of sufficient character.

Apart from further damage to his reputation, if true, these latest allegations could cause legal trouble for Bonds. A federal grand jury is investigating whether he perjured himself when testifying in the Balco case in 2003 that he never knowingly used performance-enhancing drugs.

Under baseball’s amphetamines policy, players are not publicly identified for a first positive test. A second failed test for amphetamines results in a 25-game suspension. The first positive steroids test results in a 50-game ban.

The Daily News said that Bonds did not appeal the positive test, which made him subject to six drugs tests by MLB over the next six months.

The 42-year-old, who has hit 734 home runs, 21 shy of Hank Aaron’s all-time record, is negotiating a one-year contract extension with the Giants worth about £9 million.

• 755 Hank Aaron’s single-season home-run record, the holy grail Barry Bonds is chasing