Grimsley Bust a Good Start, By: Roy Fuoco

June 13, 2006

The best thing that happened to baseball in the past week was Jason Grimsley's getting busted by the feds.

The only way to truly clean up baseball is get all the performance-enancing drug use out in the open, all of it -- steroids, human growth hormones, amphetamines, etc, and this is just another step in getting to the root of the problem.

Baseball is no different than many other industries or administrative bodies. They all don't like bad publicity, so instead of dealing with the issues head-on, they stick their collective heads in the sand and hope the bad news goes away.

Faced with a union that only cares about protecting the highest salaries, baseball officials never had the stomach, nor the power, to take on the union and get it to agree to a proper drugtesting program that includes the blood-testing needed for HGH.

When Marvin Miller organized the players association into a proper union, it had the moral -- and in a lot of cases, legal -- high ground. The union fought for a strong pension plan at a time when legitimate player/worker rights issues were working conditions and free agency.

But the union has long since squandered the high ground.

The union didn't stop dragging its feet until Congress got involved. And for all the abuse Congress took when it held the hearings, it did force baseball to finally start getting serious on the steroid issue.

We all knew, however, that it was only a starting point. This is a step-by-step process. The Ken Caminiti story, Jose Canseco's book, BALCO, the Congressional hearings, Barry Bonds, Shadows of the Game, Mark McGwire, Sammy Sosa, Rafael Palmeiro -- it all builds to a point where the problem can't be overlooked.

Bonds has been a big focal point, but contrary to what Bonds' apologists think, it wasn't just about him. Bonds was/is a target because he is the high-profile name who still is playing.

It wasn't a witch hunt. Enough of the dots connected to make him a legitimate suspect in the steroid issue, not because he was a black athlete about to pass Babe Ruth. This isn't 1974. Babe Ruth's legacy is safe, and nothing is going to change that no matter how many hitters pass him.

There might have been a gleeful piling on because of Bonds' reputation as a jerk, but so be it. There was a lot of piling on with McGwire after the hearings, and he was a media darling at one point.

More names likely will come out of the Grimsley investigation. At some point, I wouldn't be surprised if it became an avalanche of names.

That will be a good thing, because maybe, just maybe, there then will be enough forces at work to bring about a true solution. The biggest myth out there is that Cal Ripken Jr. or the McGwire-Sosa home run saved baseball after the cancellation of the '94 World Series.

Baseball saved baseball. It's a great game that has survived for more than 100 years through good times and bad.