On baseball: Steroids in baseball won't be going away, By: Martin Renzhofer

8/13/06

Does anyone really expect athletes to stop using performance enhancers? Nope, they are here to stay - only because drug tests are not as sophisticated as the drugs.
   So, everyone is guilty until proven innocent.
   In his groundbreaking book "Ball Four," author and former baseball player Jim Bouton speculated that if pitchers were offered a pill that would take five years off their life but guarantee them 20 wins, they'd take it. Bouton must have known something; last year, 46 of the 93 players who tested positive for steroids were pitchers.
   Most likely, Bouton wasn't talking about steroids, though they have existed in the sports world since the 1950s, when bodybuilders began experimenting with them, to create freakishly large muscles. During the 1960s and '70s, the European Communist Bloc countries made spectacular inroads in combining drugs and sports - sometimes without the athletes' permission, as numerous East Germans discovered later.
   The practice was obvious enough that in 1976, National Lampoon magazine featured a parody of a female Soviet athlete for its cover, with male attributes.
   Then there's www.deadspin.com, which claims to have credible sources who can fill in some of the names that were blacked out when disgraced pitcher Jason Grimsley turned parrot.
   "We feel pretty confident in them, but we can't go 100 percent, since the information is secondhand," Deadspin writes. "We'll say this: If Bud Selig issuing a press release naming the names is a 10, and picking a player at random out of the Baseball Encyclopedia is a 1, we're at an 8 . . . What we can confirm? The doozy."
   Albert Pujols.
   Anyone batting an eyelash?
   The Web site highlights the role former Kansas City strength and conditioning coordinator Chris Mihlfeld played in the Grimsley mess, as well as his relationship with the Cardinals' slugging first baseman:

   "[The Grimsley document] doesn't say the trainer/Mihlfeld supplied all the HGH and what-not; it just says the trainer was the referrer."
   Ouch. No wonder Pujols has become Barry Bonds' biggest defender. And, oh, did baseball and Bud Selig sigh in relief when Pujols injured himself while on pace to break Bonds' record of 73 homers in a season.
   At the same time baseball crows about how it's curing its steroid problem, HGH remains out of Selig's reach.
   According to the New York Times, two players in the major leagues and 32 in the minor leagues have tested positive. In contrast, by the end of last year, the number had reached 93, with 81 in the minor leagues and 12 in the majors.
   The statistics "also show that two trends that emerged last year continue to hold form: many of those testing positive are from Latin America, or are pitchers, or are both."
   That is worth a story in itself.
   Rob Manfred, baseball's executive vice president for labor relations and human resources, is missing the point when he says, "We believe that the programs are working. When you make penalties much more severe, as we have, fewer people will be willing to take the risk."
   As anyone involved with track or cycling knows, even with lifetime bans hanging over their heads, those athletes just find new ways of getting around the test. Why should baseball players be any different?