Baseball's steroid investigation is all for show, By: Dan Le Batard

March 31, 2006, Miami Herald

MIAMI - So now a former Senator waddles into the manure for public-relations purposes. Too little, too late. George Mitchell, eye candy, is here to lend the illusion of integrity, but it will be swallowed here by a sport's overwhelming lack of it.

Congress and Baseball - following, not leading - react not because of the sport's history books but because of best-selling books, one of them written by author Jose Canseco. It is funny and symbolic and too perfect that the leader of all this, the pioneer, would be a muscle head last seen strip-teasing in a lavender Speedo in last season's Surreal Life.

There's an awful lot of money and time and effort being wasted here for something as small as an asterisk. Investigation? It will reveal nothing interesting, useful or new. There is no effective way to investigate something this contaminated to the core. This isn't John Dowd looking into one man, Pete Rose. We will never know how many home runs Barry Bonds hit because of steroids or how many of them he hit off of pitchers who were using steroids. Investigating baseball now is like trying to nail sewage to the wall.

Steroids help you heal. Pitchers were using as much as hitters, if not more so. We oversimplify it, focusing on just the home runs. Yes, Bonds, unprecedented, became great late. But where are we if Mitchell digs up dirt on Roger Clemens, who got greater even later? Evens the playing field. Solves nothing.

Remember, this sport was so polluted that even the Alex Sanchezes of the world were using. You can't wonder how Sammy Sosa went from 60 to zero in four seconds flat without wondering why muscular Kevin Brown kept breaking down, too. You can't ask Bret Boone how his numbers and body inflated without asking Eric Gagne where the heck he found those extra 7 mph.

Sosa, Mark McGwire, Rafael Palmeiro and Bonds took a bat to the record books during the steroid era. It is understandable, given how irrationally competitive athletes are, that they would climb through a loophole created by the sport's lack of testing and leadership. That's what great athletes do. They find ways to get advantages, to get better, to climb atop all the competitive cruelty in the piranha tank.

Steroids saved baseball. Sosa and McGwire lifted it back up after a work stoppage cost us a World Series. Attendance has never been higher than it is today. The sport has never been healthier. Call these athletes selfish cheaters if it makes you feel better, but they clearly gave us what we wanted. And its naive to expect people this cutthroat to choose morality over adding a few years to their careers.

We don't scream, ``Fraud!'' when Hollywood movie stars use human-growth hormone to look younger. We don't wag castigating fingers at rock stars for their unseemly off-stage behavior. But we've made a cathedral out of sports, which is just another kind of entertainment, because we're always looking at these games through a child's eyes. So Bonds sinks into this noisy outrage while another steroid freak parlays his steroid use and abuse into movie-star fame and the governorship of California.

You want to asterisk today's users? That's fine. Put the steroid smear next to their names forever. But they were just doing what was allowed with a wink-wink during their time. There weren't punishments or watchdogs for use. That's why we have rules and referees in sports. Given how competitive the great ones are, icon Cal Ripken Jr. would have stabbed the catcher with a machete to win a home-plate collision if there weren't repercussions for doing so and rules against it. You can't expect inmates to govern themselves, which is why any investigation Bud Selig starts on this has to end at his desk.

And while we're throwing around asterisks, you might want to put one next to Babe Ruth's name, too. All he did was play against white people. That was an unfair advantage of his era, not unlike steroids is to this one. In fact, Bonds playing on steroids against a world-wide talent pool is less of an advantage than Ruth facing a bunch of American white pitchers who had second jobs as plumbers.

Ah, yes, the race card. That's bound to come up here with Bonds. Racism cries always start when a black athlete gets in trouble. Its easy and convenient and, in many cases, justified. It is hard to explain how Bonds comes under this avalanche while another sports hero has a damning book written about him, and yet unscathed Lance Armstrong goes to the White House and hosts the ESPYs.

But McGwire, Paul Bunyan in spikes, would be getting clubbed this way, too, if he were chasing the most sacred record in all of sports in our most numerical game. It doesn't help that Bonds is defiant, arrogant, angry and loud, but that has more to do with him being disliked than the color of his skin. He is being witch-hunted here, but it is because of the sanctity of the record he approaches and the artificial way he arrived at its doorstep. His excellence is his blessing and his curse. Ivan Rodriguez going from ``Pudge'' to Kenyan marathoner doesn't garner this kind of interest or inspection.

So the former Senator is going to waste his and our time investigating all of them now because it looks good.

It's simple politics: look like you are doing a lot while you are doing very little.