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Steroids foul baseball again

Wallace Matthews

February 12, 2008

Some things never change. On the day pitchers and catchers will begin to trickle in at spring training camps across the country, for the 25th consecutive year Roger Clemens will prepare to take the hill.

Capitol Hill.

This is the mess baseball has made for itself. To those of us who love the game, who suffer through the winter, who slog through the NFL and the NBA and the NHL, who tolerate the willful chaos of the BCS and the hypocritical foolishness of March Madness, this should be a week of national celebration.

Instead, it is a week of shame and embarrassment. And inevitability. Ever since the man who protects the players decided to collude with the man who protects the owners in allowing performance-enhancing drugs to taint baseball, to render its records meaningless and spit in the face of the accomplishments of its greatest players, this day has been coming. And now it's here. By the end of 2008, both Clemens and Barry Bonds, arguably the greatest players of our generation, could very well find themselves being carted off to jail cells.

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What a fine legacy for Bud Selig. What a great line on the resume for Donald Fehr. What a way to kick off a season.

While Selig and Fehr were working to protect their own special interests, nobody was looking out for the game. That, supposedly, was your job and mine. Except every time anyone tried to, he was shouted down, ridiculed, stonewalled, told it was a non-issue.

Now, of course, it is the game that suffers.

Clemens, fresh off his goodwill tour of Congress with looseleaf binder in hand and flattery on his lips for the men who are supposed to be investigating him, will be on the stand tomorrow trying to refute the allegations of a personal trainer, a guy who makes his living counting reps. And, if you believe Brian McNamee, administering injections.

The fact that his former training partner and buddy, Andy Pettitte, has been excused from testifying, having apparently given up enough in his deposition to blast the Rocket into lunar orbit, only makes it worse. Now, the congressmen are free to do what the Indians did to Roger in the ALDS - dig in and swing away for as long as they like.

Meanwhile, across the country, Bonds and his lawyers prepare to do battle with federal prosecutors on five counts of perjury and obstruction of justice charges stemming from his testimony to a grand jury investigating his alleged steroid use. With luck, his case will come to trial just in time to coincide with baseball's big All-Star Weekend at Yankee Stadium, or maybe even the World Series.

They all would like it to just go away, but of course it won't, nor should it. The specter of Bonds and Clemens facing jail time will cast a shadow over the entire season, and who knows which names will emerge next?

Whoever they are, they will not shock us. We are way beyond that point now. And it is nobody's fault but theirs - Selig, Fehr and their henchmen, Gene Orza, Bob DuPuy, Rob Manfred - who in their arrogance believed that if they ignored reality long enough, it would cease to be real.

But it is real, and it is here and now, live and in color, on your flat-screen all week long.

Instead of talking about whether the Yankees can bounce back from the Attack of the Midges, we will be consumed with Roger's syringes. And if McNamee is to be believed, Debbie's, too.

On Thursday, most of the city's top baseball writers will congregate in Tampa. What do you think the line of questioning is going to be?

It is shaping up to be a circus, and in the center ring are the headlining clowns, Bud and Donald. This didn't come about because baseball "was dragging its feet" on the issue, as a friend of mine suggested yesterday. Foot-dragging implies dilemma, confusion, indecision. Or the entire messy-haired, addle-brained, Jerry Lewis as The Nutty Professor image Selig has fashioned for himself. And it implies inaction through the wrestling with some heavy moral and legal issues, as befitting the public persona Fehr has taken great pains to project.

But that is all nonsense. If fans and journalists were suspecting players were juicing as far back as 1990, when Lenny Dykstra showed up in Clearwater for his first spring training with the Phillies looking like Carrot Top does now, then surely baseball's insiders already knew.

And by the fabled summer of '98, when Selig and Fehr conspired to present the Mr. Olympia contest masquerading as a baseball season - remember those All-Star Game commercials featuring animated representations of the players bulging out of their double-knits like the Incredible Hulk - the whole thing was a big joke being played on you by them. While you - and I - were wondering what the hell was going on, Selig and Fehr were laughing all the way to the blood bank.

This was no accident and it was no mistake. It was a concerted effort to first get back into your good graces, then deeper into your pockets by allowing Major League Baseball to become a league of juice monkeys.

Now the monkeys are out of the barrel. The circus they performed in is being exposed in all its shabby little details. The best players in the game are about to be grilled, embarrassed, exposed and maybe jailed.

Pitchers and catchers report this week, but there's only one pitcher anyone will be interested in. The one taking the hill in Washington, trying to explain why anyone should care about the beginning of spring training ever again.