Mike Celizic

Of all the penthouse-to-outhouse trips in the history of sports, it’s hard to think of one more precipitous and bizarre than that taken by Rafael Palmeiro.

He’s finished, through, done, history. Whatever chance he had of recovering from being caught with steroids in his system after waving his finger at a congressional subcommittee while denying ever using drugs is gone.

Forget the Hall of Fame. Forget playing again. Forget commercial endorsements. Forget being invited to autograph shows.

Back in July, when he became just the fourth player in history with 3,000 hits and 500 home runs, Palmeiro was as high as a player can get. Then came the steroid suspension.

Some suggested there was a chance he could come back from that. But now, with his latest craven act of cowardice, Palmeiro is through. He broke the most hallowed rule in baseball: He tried to blame a teammate for what he did.

Palmiero threw his teammate, Miguel Tejada, under the convoy. Tejada, Palmiero said, once gave him what Tejada said was a vitamin B-12 injection, and that might have been where the steroids came from.

Baseball officials dutifully checked Tejada’s medicine chest and confirmed that the B-12 was just that and nothing more. Tejada, who says he’s been tested three times and is as clean as your grandmother’s guest towels, said he was shocked that Palmiero would implicate him.

I’d be more than shocked if I were Tejada. I’d be outraged that Palmeiro, in what is an increasingly desperate and frantic effort to restore an image that has long since been shattered, would dare to blame a teammate who Palmeiro has to know is innocent. If Palmiero ever dared to walk into the Orioles’ clubhouse again, he’d better be wearing body armor.

You’d think that blaming a teammate would be the ultimate. But when the story broke about his cowardly act, Palmeiro’s lawyer made it even worse by saying his client wasn’t trying to implicate anyone. He was just trying to figure out how those nasty steroids got into his body and felt duty-bound to tell the investigators everything he’d taken or been given.

That excuse is, to steal a phrase from Abraham Lincoln, thinner than a soup made from the shadow of a chicken that was dying of starvation.

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There isn’t a steroid fairy who comes in the middle of the night and infuses your body with drugs without your knowledge. Steroids don’t show up in your urine by accident. You don’t get false positives for steroids by eating poppy seed rolls. Or taking vitamin B-12 shots.

The only way you get steroids in your body is to put them there.

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