There’s Obvious Cheating Going On, but Who Really Cares?

Don’t get caught up in asking which baseball players are taking steroids and just save yourself time by making a list of the players who aren’t.

Stop to wonder exactly why federal agents have dedicated so much time and money to the pursuit of Victor Conte, the small-time peddler with the big-name clients.

Why are they less trustworthy with confidential grand jury testimony transcripts than a bad bullpen is with a late-in-the-game lead? If the feds are dedicated to halting the trafficking of steroids, then why is their use so widespread?

While the spotlight shines on a few trespassers -- such as baseball slugger Jason Giambi and sprinter Kelli White by admission, and superstar Barry Bonds and track queen Marion Jones by implication -- hundreds more are sneaking under the fence.

If a guy like Conte, whose medical training consisted of copying articles about minerals from a Stanford library, can come up with substances that beat drug tests, then what about the true lab whizzes?

And why aren’t these quotes from Conte’s interview with ESPN the Magazine getting more play?:

“Do I think a majority of baseball players use performance-enhancing drugs? Yes.”

“I liked Marion [Jones] and I don’t think she was doing anything differently than anyone else.”

In other words, everybody’s cheating.

It’s a massive failure on the part of the feds, baseball and the anti-doping agencies entrusted with the impossible task of cleaning up the Olympics.

More than that, it’s a failure by the media and the fans, the last lines of defense. We’re either too stupid to see it happening in front of our faces, or we simply don’t care.

The evidence points to the latter.

Baseball turnstiles clicked more than 73 million times this year, even though spring training began under the dark clouds of politicians calling out baseball’s flimsy drug-testing policy and Bonds facing questions about steroid use.

It seems the question that mattered most to fans wasn’t whether the players were juiced, it was whether the Boston Red Sox were indeed hopelessly cursed.

They weren’t. The Sox, that is. As for the players, we have more evidence than ever that they were artificially enhanced. Gary Sheffield, a strong 2004 MVP candidate, said he unknowingly took a steroid-based cream he got from Bonds’ trainer. Giambi, a former American League MVP, said he took performance-enhancing drugs he obtained from Bonds’ trainer, according to transcripts obtained by the San Francisco Chronicle.

The Chronicle reported that Bonds said he took the same substances but claimed he did not know they were illegal.

He’s asking us to believe he does not carefully monitor his body, isn’t aware of any unusual changes. And there are side effects. White cited acne, a changing voice and longer and more frequent menstrual cycles. Giambi had a benign tumor on his pituitary gland, potentially related to the steroid use.

We ought to be skeptical, not only of Bonds but of every athlete who stands so far above his peers.

Lance Armstrong owns the Tour de France, his victory rides down the Champs-Elysee becoming a regular part of Paris summers. He has strongly denied every doping accusation lobbed at him, and never tested positive for anything illegal. But it makes you wonder how one man could cleanly dominate a sport so rampant with cheaters.

It’s sad, but you almost have to assume negatives.

Charles Yesalis, the Penn State professor and author of three books on steroid use in sports, once asked me how I could believe football players could grow so large so fast in college, considering they already came to campus as the best physical specimens from high school.

In other words, it’s not natural. And at the highest level of competition, being naturally gifted isn’t enough. You wonder if the best can get better without a little artificial assistance.

Of course, they still need the work ethic and skills that bring them to the top in the first place. There’s no substance that makes you faster or stronger simply by ingesting it, no training necessary.

It’s easier to take on -- and potentially take out -- the big names rather than shut entire sports down. There’s too much money at stake, especially in the Olympic Games.

So if you see a big bust, it isn’t an accomplishment. It’s a small sacrifice. This is about getting Bonds. Although he’s the best hitter you’ll ever see, regardless of how he got that way, his attitude made him hard to embrace. That makes him easy to take down.

We live in the culture of the big “get,” the attention-grabbing interview or arrest.

What’s funny is that this mess has made Conte a get, as evidenced by the hype ABC gave his “20/20” interview.

In reality, Conte’s no one special. Somewhere, someone else is stirring up another batch of undetectable juice, beating the system while making the rest of us losers because we keep buying tickets.

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J.A. Adande can be reached at j.a.adande@latimes.com. To read previous columns by Adande, go to latimes.com/adande.