Baseball's future hinges on cleaning up steroids, By: Rick Morrissey

September 12, 2007 

A lot of words have been devoted to explaining why baseball has to clean up its steroids mess, even if that means tracking down evidence to prove that what we watched five years ago or 20 years ago was a fraud.

Some have called it a witch hunt.

Others have said they're into baseball for the entertainment value and don't care what players ingest or inject as long as it produces home runs in bulk. Give them a pro wrestler with a baseball bat. They're fine with that as long as there are enough oohs to go with the aahs.  In these dark times for baseball, it's easy to get worn down, to feel like it's all useless, to believe that the fight to eradicate performance-enhancing drugs from the game we love is a lost battle.

Then Dodgers second baseman Jeff Kent—ornery, difficult Jeff Kent—comes along and puts things in proper perspective.

"Major League Baseball is trying to investigate the past so they can fix the future," he told the San Francisco Chronicle. "They're not trying to investigate the past to fix the past. That won't happen."

That's it, isn't it, the essence of what's happening here? The only thing baseball has is its reputation, and if that's shot, then all you really do have is The Undertaker, The Great Khali and the rest of the boys flexing for the crowd.

If the future has a credibility problem, then why should anyone care to keep watching? That's baseball's predicament, and that's why it is going after the drug problem with such gusto. Yes, we know MLB has been criminally late to the party. But better late than never.

A few players have been called to baseball's principal's office to explain why their names showed up in the records of a company that allegedly provided human-growth hormone to its clients.

Among the players implicated in the scandal are the Orioles' Jay Gibbons, the Blue Jays' Troy Glaus and the Cardinals' feel-good story, Rick Ankiel. They reportedly bought steroids or HGH from a Florida-based company being investigated for illegally selling prescription drugs.

People scoff when I bring children into the equation. They say athletes aren't role models. They say it's up to parents to be their children's role models, to warn them against the perils of steroid use. But usage is on the rise in high school sports, and that's not coincidence. It's the result of seeing pro athletes succeed with the help of pharmaceuticals. It's the result of peer pressure, too, just as teenage drinking and driving often is the result of peer pressure.

Kids are the future.

The question here is whether the future is salvageable for baseball. And the answer is yes, if the sport can continue to make its testing even more stringent. Baseball doesn't test for HGH, and it's a major hole in the game.

It's why you take any success story these days with a large grain of salt. It's painful to say that, and it speaks to the nasty cynicism that pervades sports. But when Ankiel makes an incredible comeback and then ends up on an HGH mailing list, some of us wonder how we could have been so gullible.

Barry Bonds, the puffed-up power hitter, we get. All you need are two eyes and half a brain to see how he came to be the greatest home run hitter in history. But Ankiel, the pitcher-turned-outfielder, we miss. He comes back in another life as a home run-hitting fool just when the Cardinals need him most. And somehow we don't question the improbability of that even a little bit.