COMMENTARY

By Tim Dahlberg

updated 10:23 a.m. ET March 15, 2005

You wish there were some good guys in this stinking drama to rally around.

You wish the whole thing would go away because this is a time, after all, when the grass turns green and hope is supposed to spring eternal for all baseball fans.

The good guys, though, are about as elusive here as the real ingredients in the “clear” that Barry Bonds mistakenly thought was a nutritional supplement used to lower cholesterol, not build giant muscles.

And now that Congress has its fingers firmly imbedded in this juiced-up pie, get used to the idea that — no matter how much you hate to keep hearing about it — this will be the season of steroids.

You’ll hear about it from now through opening day as politicians, ballplayers, owners and union figures engage in a snake dance that couldn’t be any sleazier if it was conducted in a strip club rather than the halls of Congress.

You’ll hear it every time Jason Giambi comes to the plate and hits a routine fly ball that might have gone out of the ballpark a few years earlier.

The talk will grow as Bonds gets nearer to Babe Ruth and eventually passes baseball’s most revered icon, all the while thumbing his nose at the very fans who pay to cheer him on.

Finally, it will explode as he chases Henry Aaron and baseball’s biggest record.

By then, you’ll groan at the very mention of steroids. You’ll turn down the television when the subject comes up, and scan past the stories in the newspaper.

Most of all, though, you’ll wish that performance-enhancing drugs hadn’t defaced the sport you love.

The sad truth is that they have, no matter how often Bud Selig winds himself up and pretends otherwise. The sad truth is that baseball’s records are now as tainted as the drug samples the sport never bothered to take until after Bonds hit 73 home runs in one season.

Baseball owners won’t take any responsibility for the integrity of the game because they’re too busy building new stadiums and counting luxury box revenues sparked by the home run binge of recent years. Neither will baseball players, an immensely spoiled group of multimillionaires who don’t feel they are accountable to anyone or anybody.

So here come the nation’s politicians, who got where they are by being able to recognize opportunity when they see it. A House committee invited players, owners and union reps to come to Washington, D.C. on March 17 to testify under oath about baseball’s dirty little secrets.

On Wednesday, after figuring out the players wouldn’t come without a little persuasion, they issued subpoenas for them to appear.