Mike Celizic

That other shoe we’ve been waiting to fall has just hit the floor, and it’s a size 47EEEE. If what the Feds say Jason Grimsley said is true, it’s impossible to believe that anyone who played during baseball’s “Juiced Era” is beyond suspicion.

The reports contend Grimsley told friends that the FBI agents who swept down on him and forced his admission to using performance-enhancing drugs are attributing statements to him that he didn’t make. Just the same, a new batch of names has been dropped, and one of them is to pitching what Barry Bonds is to hitting.

Roger Clemens, the L.A. Times reported Sunday, is one of the names the FBI says Grimsley dropped. Andy Pettitte, Miguel Tejada, Brian Roberts and Jay Gibbons are others. Gibbons is a bit player, an outfielder/DH/first baseman with the Orioles. The others are stars.

It hardly matters whether or not the allegations are true; no player has tested positive and it’s impossible to establish guilt — or innocence. All we really know is what Jose Canseco and others have said — the game was awash in more juice than a SunKist factory.

No one who played before baseball started seriously testing for steroids two years ago is above suspicion, nor is any record set during the period. I’d say that guys like Derek Jeter — who are long and lean and don’t hit tons of home runs — were clean, but I can’t say that with certainty. Andy Pettitte is long and lean, too, and these reports say he used something. What about Alex Rodriguez, another player who has always been accused of never cheating? He hit 52 home runs in 2001 and 57 in 2002 during the height of the home run explosion and he hasn’t hit 50 since. He’s never tested positive, but neither have any of the other big names being accused.

So forget about putting asterisks by names or vacating records. For more than eight decades, baseball has played with the ball and the pitcher’s mound and the size of its ballparks to add or subtract runs and long balls from the game.

Just as baseball has its dead-ball era to describe the records set before the game wound the ball tighter in the 1920s to create more Babe Ruths, let it call the home-run explosion that began in the mid-1990s the juiced player era. If you are going to accept the extraordinary ERAs put up in the mid-1960s because of a bloated strike zone and mounds that lacked but a few inches to qualify as Alps, you have to accept the extraordinary offensive numbers created by a drug that baseball refused to test for because the results of its use were good for business.

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You can’t keep them out of the Hall of Fame. Bonds remains one of the best hitters ever to play the game and Clemens one of the best pitchers. If voters want to make a statement and leave them off their ballots during their first year of eligibility, fine. But you can’t keep them out. Just as the Hall enshrines cut-ball artists and spitball impresarios — activities defined by the game as cheating — it has to enshrine people who took drugs that the game didn’t even bother testing for.

Once you’ve done that, you can hardly blame a pitcher for wanting to get the same edge he knew the hitters had. If nothing else, it was a level playing field whether it was ankle-deep in juice or not.

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