Surprise, Ariz. ? Boy, who knew that coming down from Mount Steroid would be such a bummer, huh, Barry?

Who knew it would make you feel so bad?

Bad enough to make you just want to quit.

Bad enough to admit defeat to your most hated enemy, the media.

Bad enough to make you run and hide.

Unfortunately for baseball, the likelihood is that Barry Bonds will quickly get over the seemingly infinite weariness that weighed him down Tuesday. He won’t really jump off that figurative bridge he placed himself upon, more’s the pity.

Face it, baseball just isn’t that lucky.

It would solve so many problems if Bonds did quit. Baseball wouldn’t have to go through some farcical celebration as he inevitably passed Babe Ruth and Hank Aaron as baseball’s all-time home run hitter. The game’s sacred record book would be safe. Playing the sympathy card might even help Bonds when his name eventually comes up on the Hall of Fame ballot.

Except for one minor problem … none of this is going to happen. Bonds won’t quit, and virtually everyone in baseball understands that.

“Guys get their knees scoped and they’re back in a month,” Michael Young was saying in the Texas Rangers’ clubhouse. “I can’t see him quitting.”

Some speculate that Bonds was just having a down day, that he was feeling dejected after his third knee surgery since October. Rehab at 40 is no fun.

But the more likely possibility is that the whole scene at the Giants’ camp was orchestrated for maximum sympathy effect.

Sitting at a picnic table with his 15-year-old son Nikolai next to him … leaning his head on his crutches … that soulful, weight-of-the-world-on-his-shoulders expression … hold it a sec, while I wipe my eyes.

“I’m tired of my kids crying. You wanted me to jump off a bridge, I finally did,” Bonds told Giants beat writers in an impromptu news conference. “You finally brought me and my family down. … So now go pick a different person.”

Kids crying, Barry? Family brought down? Hmmm. Any chance that maybe that has less to do with the media than with the fact that your mistress of nine years just ratted you out to the grand jury?

Bonds has allegedly admitted “unknowingly” using steroids to a grand jury, has had his former mistress bring the IRS on him after he reportedly gave her $80,000 for a down payment on a house, and reinjured his knee because he wasn’t following the Giants’ trainers’ rehab program.

And what responsibility does Bonds take for all this trouble?

Zero.

It’s always somebody else’s fault.

What you also might not have heard is that before Bonds put on his woe-is-me act, he told reporters he wouldn’t talk until San Francisco Chronicle beat writer Henry Schulman left the area. The Chronicle has broken most of the stories about the BALCO investigation, and Bonds told Schulman he never would talk to him again.

Some guys have all the luck.