UPDATE 2-Bonds' career in doubt in face of perjury charges

(Updates with BALCO's Victor Conte, Ralph Kiner, details)

By Larry Fine

NEW YORK, Nov 16 (Reuters) - Barry Bonds may have played the last game of one of baseball's most extraordinary careers as the home-run king prepares to face federal charges he lied to a grand jury about using performance-enhancing drugs.

Bonds will plead not guilty to four counts of perjury and one of obstruction of justice announced Thursday stemming from his testimony in a separate investigation of a drug laboratory catering to athletes, his lawyers say.

Yet months of possible legal wrangling, possible action by Major League Baseball and the public relations nightmare he carries with him could well spell the end of Bonds' 22-year career, arguably one of the greatest of all time.

"Barry Bonds has played his last game, worn his last major league uniform, defied the truth for the last time," wrote sportswriter Gene Wojciechowski of ESPN.com.

Sportswriters across the country generally agreed that Bonds, a free agent after the San Francisco Giants decided to cut ties with him after the 2007 season, was unlikely to find a new major league team to play for.

Yet, the director of BALCO, the lab at the center of a global doping scandal, said that blood and urine samples the player gave the lab would fall short of standards needed to convict him of perjury.

"It's a smoking gun without any bullets," Victor Conte, who has long denied he provided performance-enhancing drugs to Bonds, told Reuters.