PHILADELPHIA -- So, Mark McGwire has saved baseball.
Again.
That's how it has been laid out for us, anyway. McGwire's belated confession of steroid use, complete with crocodile tears and face-saving disclaimers, has served as a sort of holy water, ending baseball's era of performance-enhancing drugs, hearkening yet another new fresh start for the game.
That's pretty much what Bud Selig said after the man who wouldn't talk about the past to Congress finally spoke about it to Bob Costas. On the day of McGwire's mea culpa, Selig said in a statement that in 2010, the use of steroids and amphetamines in baseball is "virtually nonexistent, as our testing results have shown."
Two things: Either the commissioner of Major League Baseball pays no attention to the nonstop cat-and-mouse game still taking place between the International Olympic Committee and its world-class athletes, or he's back to his old car-selling ways again.
If he ever really left them.
Otherwise, he would not have followed with this: "The so-called steroid era -- a reference that is resented by the many players who played in that era and never touched the substances -- is clearly a thing of the past, and Mark's admission today is another step in the right direction."
The steroid era might be a thing of the past in baseball. But performance-enhancing drugs are an ever-evolving industry, as the IOC and its testing agents long ago discovered. Simply stated, the cycle goes as follows: You design a testing program to detect all known performance-enhancing drugs. They design a new drug that escapes that detection. After a while, you get wise, develop even more encompassing detection. They take your test, and build a new PED that avoids that detection.
When he was in town the other day, Chase Utley was asked to comment on McGwire's confession.
"What did he say?" Utley wryly responded, drawing laughter from the room. The Phillies second baseman may be many things. Naive is not one of them.
"If you're trying to get me to stick my foot in my mouth, it ain't happening," he then said, before offering this:
"I think I'm in a different position, because I came up in an era where there was testing. It's not allowed and if you get caught, you're in trouble. You don't just lose time on the field, you lose money. So guys who come up at similar times that I came up in, it's not even relevant. It's not even part of our game.
"Apparently, back then, it was part of baseball. And I don't judge those guys for what they did. But I do applaud baseball for putting a program together that keeps steroids out of the game."
Covered all the bases, he did. Except for that nagging one, about it not being "part of our game." Baseball doesn't test extensively or as doggedly as does the World Anti-Doping Agency -- which works off a banned-substance list that grows each year. Baseball tests for steroids, stimulants and illegal drugs, and that's it.
Last week, on New York's WFAN radio, Mets third baseman David Wright was asked about increasing the substances tested for in baseball, like human growth hormone. The son of a police officer, Wright said: "I would love to hear other players' thoughts on that. The program we have now is weeding out a lot of the cheaters.
"Obviously, it would be tough to test with the blood samples, but anything to clean this game up, I'm all for it. I would love to say that 100 percent of the guys in this game are 100 percent clean."
That's what Selig said, what Utley seemed to believe the other day -- and what the head of the United States Anti-Doping Agency called, in a New York Times article, "the same stick-your-head-in-the-sand approach that led to this whole mess."
"I find it hard to believe that is what he said," Travis Tygart, the USADA chief, said of Selig.
He obviously has not been around the commissioner much.
Those who have, "clearly" understand Bud's reasons. It took all of us a long time to accept the obvious about McGwire, even after an Associated Press reporter found androstenedione at his locker during the great home-run chase of 1998. Baseball, we believed, was being purged of the bad feeling still lingering from a 1994 strike.
A decade before, we thought it unfair when Washington Post columnist Thomas Boswell postulated that the big arms and big acne on Jose Canseco were not God-made and implied steroid usage at the onset of the World Series. Game 1 of the 1988 Series aired on ESPN Classic the other day, and it included a comic rebuttal by the A's slugger in which he lamented how the charge had affected his family, while never actually denying he used.
Moments later, Canseco wristed a grand slam over the centerfield wall in Dodger Stadium.
Maybe baseball's steroid era is "clearly a thing of the past," as Selig said. Maybe the sport is as clean as Utley said it is and Wright wants it to be. But it's at least as likely that there's a chemist out there right now slipping some undetectable magic potions to some player looking to power his way into stardom and big money.
We looked the other way for a long time on McGwire, called Canseco names when he exposed an entire sport. Seeing might be believing in other places, but not in baseball.
Bud needs to use McGwire as a start, not an end. Expand the testing, stay current as the chemistry evolves.
Not to catch bad guys. To avoid them.
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