Of course, the most recent batch of players that have been thrown into the swamp have denied using anything illegal, which is what you would expect whether they are guilty or not. Just as with Bonds, whose links to chemically enhanced statistics are supported by more evidence than a hearsay report, there are no positive test results for any of them.

If we were talking about football and one of the names was Emmitt Smith, it still wouldn’t be a big deal. Before the first President Bush signed a law making steroids illegal in 1990, the NFL was infested with them, but nobody really cared. It’s still not a big deal with a football player tests positive — just part of the game in the minds of many.

Baseball is different because iconic players and the records they set are involved. It’s hypocritical to hold the national pastime to a different standard, but it’s also understandable. No kid wants to hear that there is no Santa Claus. No adult wants to hear that his or her heroes were cheating.

The difference is that with Santa Claus, the truth is met with sadness. With baseball, it’s met with outrage. It shouldn’t be. Major League Baseball, its commissioner, Bud Selig, and its players association all welcomed the infusion of offense and the barrage of long balls. It wasn’t until Congress got involved and public opinion got nasty that the game decided that maybe testing wasn’t a bad idea after all.

Congress was as hypocritical as anyone else — more so, actually. This is the outfit that authorizes nearly $20 billion a year to fight drugs and thinks nothing of locking away half a million marijuana users — not dealers — every year, yet has not authorized anything resembling a concerted effort to track down and jail steroid dealers and users.

Go to any serious gym and the steroid users are everywhere. High school kids are for the most part free to take whatever they want. You can get steroids by mail or drive over the border to Mexico and fill your trunk with them. And in the rare instances where someone actually gets caught red-handed, as happened with BALCO founder Victor Conte, the sentence is a few months in jail.

I refuse to blame the players for doing what everyone accepted and even applauded. These are the most highly competitive people in the world, people who will do anything to win. Steroids may have been illegal, but the game didn’t test for them; it didn’t want to know. The shock isn’t that large numbers of players took them, but that there were any that didn’t dip into the medicine cabinet to get another foot on the fastball, another ten feet on the long ball.

Selig wanted to find out the extent of the problem when he appointed George Mitchell to investigate the use of performance-enhancers. Now he’s finding out, and it’s ripping gaping holes in the game he was sworn to protect and didn’t.

Clemens today. Who will it be tomorrow?

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