Mike Celizic

Odds are you’ve never heard of Rich Hartmann, nor is there any reason you should have. He was a pitcher who put in two years in the Cardinals organization more than a dozen years ago; he never got above Class A.

But Hartmann thinks he has a story to tell and a point to make about steroids in baseball. The point is he didn’t take them. He also never got out of Class A.

He can’t swear that the reason he didn’t rise through the system is because he wouldn’t juice up when other kids competing against him were. But he’s convinced that an unknown number of players did miss out on the next level of the minor leagues and ultimately the majors because they chose not to cheat.

“No one’s picked up that there’s a real genuine loser in this, and it’s the minor league ballplayer who decided not to cheat,” he told me.

He’s been living with that haunting suspicion ever since he left the minors and went on to a real job in the banking industry and a home with a wife and two kids in suburban Long Island. Three years ago, when the BALCO story started to break, he started to ask around about the possibility of filing a class action lawsuit against Major League Baseball and the Major League Baseball Players Association for allowing steroid use to go on and cheating the clean players out of their shots at the big time.

He said lawyers he contacted thought it was an interesting idea with legal merit, but they also thought it would be a hard case to put together. But when the Mitchell Report came out in December and Congress scheduled hearings on it, the first of which was Tuesday, he found renewed interest.

Now, Hartmann has a lawyer, Michael Salomon, and he’s trying to round up former players from all levels of baseball who feel as he does. Hartmann said he’s not looking for money — there usually isn’t much in these suits anyway. Instead, he wants to force baseball and the players union to prove they’re really serious about ridding the sport of performance-enhancing drugs.

“There are victims here that no one’s heard about and no one’s talked about,” Salomon said. “Our goal is to get the message out that these minor leaguers lost out on opportunities.”

Hartmann also said that the current policy, as much as commissioner Bud Selig and union chief Donald Fehr congratulate themselves on it, is fundamentally flawed. Three strikes and you’re out, Hartmann said, is three too many.

Baseball's steroid scandal NYT: Ortiz, Manny reportedly on 2003 drug list Blog: What they're saying about Ortiz, Manny Blog: Fans won't turn on Ortiz, but writers will Blog: Ortiz did whatever it took — even drugs Blog: BoSox titles not tainted  |  Vote: Agree?   Slideshow: Players caught in steroid scandal

Most of the more than 200 positive drug tests under baseball’s testing policy have been in the minor leagues, and Hartmann said that’s to be expected, because that’s where players have the most to gain and the least to lose by juicing up.

“It’s $1,200 a week against $12 million a year,” Hartmann said. Given the relatively low risk of being caught to start with, he said a minor leaguer may think it’s worth taking when the penalty for a first positive is a 50-game suspension.

“They’ve established that the risk is worth the reward,” he said. “Major League Baseball and the players union came to that agreement. I find it disgusting.”

Pete Rose, he said, didn’t get three strikes. One was enough to throw him out for life. He wants the same penalty for drug use — “zero tolerance.”

At Tuesday’s hearings, Rep. Chris Shays, R-Conn., raised the same question to Selig and Fehr: Why allow multiple chances for cheaters?

Selig bragged about baseball’s drug policy being the toughest in American sports and said he needed the cooperation of the players to make such a change. Fehr said it was a matter that had to be settled in collective bargaining. Neither seemed eager to rush into such risky waters.