Glad it's all cleared up. Glad, at last, that all of baseball understands that this steroid "thing'' really goes something like this:

Jason Giambi is sorry, but he's not quite sure for what.

Barry Bonds isn't sorry for anything because, as everyone knows, what do steriods have to do with hand-eye coordination?

Sandy Alderson, a Major League Baseball executive but once the guy who ran Jose Canseco's Oakland A's, never knew anything about Canseco’s using steriods or anybody else either. And if Tony La Russa, who managed those A's teams, says he did, he forgot to tell him about it and how would he know when all he was doing was running the place?

La Russa now remembers he knew about Canseco’s being a steriod abuser and a cheat, but he didn't remember that until about a decade after he was calling Canseco the best player in the game. La Russa didn't mention it to Alderson or anyone else back then because, heck, what could he do? So instead he told about a million reporters that Canseco was the best all-around player in baseball because ... well, even he hasn't figured that part out yet. And when he saw Mark McGwire starting to swell up like Canseco he knew, of course, that it was only because of his sterling work habits because he was no Canseco. Obviously.

As for McGwire, he once was the single-season home run king, even if he might have been running on high test at the time as Canseco claims. More importantly, he knows that won't change as long as he keeps a low profile, which is more than can be said for Bonds, Giambi, LaRussa, Alderson, Canseco and commissioner Bud Selig, who consistently proves he doesn't know what day it is, so how could he know there were baseball players using performance-enhancing drugs. Drugs? Surely you jest?

The one thing that's sure is that Selig knows the steroid policy finally put in place after the Feds started hauling some of the game's biggest names in front of a San Francisco grand jury will do the trick.

That's the policy that states firmly that if a baseball player tests positive for performance-enhancing drugs 117 times he'll get no second chance from Bud or the Grand Old Game. He'll get the weekend off.

Without pay, too. Take that.

When will they ever learn, these big organizations, that it's the cover-up that does them in, not the crime itself. Richard Nixon. Bill Clinton. The Catholic Church. Now the American Pastime, which is in danger of becoming past it's time if it continues to believe it can simply declare the steroid mess over and it will disappear.

As Bonds said Tuesday in his first public accounting, "Why do you keep asking the same questions? I'm not a child. You repeat those same things to children and eventually they'll tell you. I don't.''

No, Barry, you don't. You lie instead. Just like Giambi lied and Selig lied and many of the rest of them have lived a lie. They lied purposefully in some cases and lied by turning a blind eye to how a sport can go decades with only two men hitting 60 home runs or more and all of a sudden there's an explosion of 50, 60 and even 70 home runs seasons.

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