Baseball created a culture of neglect in steroid controversy, By: Terry Pluto

April 4, 2006, Akron Beacon Journal

AKRON, Ohio - Major League Baseball is about to pay for its sin of neglect, of knowing something had been very wrong with the game for years but refusing to do anything about it.

Don't forget that, as baseball tries to clean out its ugly attic of steroid use.

Commissioner Bud Selig has hired his friend, former Senate Majority Leader George Mitchell, to lead an investigation into the problem. Mitchell also happens to be on the board of the Boston Red Sox. Can he see past those connections to have a truly unbiased investigation?

Those ties to the baseball establishment don't seem to make him the ideal choice. But assuming baseball is serious about this, here's what Mitchell should find: A lot of players were using in the 1990s, and the early years of this decade.

Some big-name hitters.

Some big-name pitchers.

Some hitters and pitchers whose careers couldn't even be helped by steroids.

And baseball didn't care.

He'll find that not "everyone was doing it." Probably not "most" were using. But a lot were, and it had a dramatic impact on the game.

He'll find that this is much, much deeper than the questions over Barry Bonds. If this investigation is simply about Bonds, then it is indeed purely political and perhaps even racist as its critics claim.

A year ago, Rafael Palmeiro had the gall to stand in front of the U.S. Congress and say that he never tried steroids. Then he was caught on a test a few months later. He was suspended by baseball for 10 games.

Mark McGwire wisely doesn't want to talk about any of it. He apparently knows what he has to say is, at the very least, embarrassing. He's retired and keeps a very low profile.

Jason Giambi basically admitted being on steroids at some point in his career in a press conference last year in which he refused to use the dirty word. He apologized, but wouldn't say for what.

Several pitchers also were nabbed by tests last summer.

Just look at the list: players of nearly every color and nearly every position.

Some are shining stars, some barely a twinkle in the major-league galaxy. Others are retired. Many were using before baseball had rules against it, so they'd argue, "How can it be wrong?"

Only if the substances used were against the laws of the government can they be faulted, at least from a legal standpoint.

It's a mess.

It's also hard to know what the investigation will lead to in the long run - other than hopefully scaring players from trying steroids in the future.

But even that is questionable. As the Olympics have demonstrated, this often is a high-tech war of chemists, those employed to give the tests and those working for the athletes to help them beat the tests.

This investigation can be thorough, and it shouldn't take America's premier special forces to dig up a lot of steroid dirt.

What can be done about the former players? Not much. Do you erase their records? How do you know when they used steroids? One year? Ten years? Keep in mind, we had steroid-enhanced hitters facing steroid-enhanced pitchers? What about that?

What about a current player who has passed every Major League Baseball steroid test in the last few years - but the investigations find they were using before baseball tested and had rules against steroids?

Do you suspend them now for something they did back then, something baseball just seemed to wink at and ignore? What about Selig? At the very least, it seems he should suspend himself. So far, he refuses to say he and his office are accountable for at least part of this problem.

By the time this is over, a lot of players are really going to look bad. But the people running baseball should be deemed far worse because their neglect created a culture for this to happen.