Designer Steroid Chatter Is All the Rage for Spring

Emptying out this week’s spring training baseball notebook:

Pitchers and catchers have reported, along with their lawyers, to the posting of new dugout signs: “Absolutely No Pepper or Personal Trainers.”

Get this: Everyone in the game now seems ticked off except Kevin Brown.

Brown, the former Dodger grouch, is suddenly Mr. Sunshine as a New York Yankee. Then again, he has yet to throw an official pitch or be designated for his first rehabilitation assignment.

Brown wants to be more like Ernie Banks. His new policy with reporters is Let’s Say Two (words).

This steroid-testing issue has cast a pall over the grand game.

At the end of one recent seventh-inning stretch, two San Francisco Giant fans were overheard singing, “So it’s one, two, three strikes you’re out at the old BAL-CO game.”

Something had to give on this. It was not a coincidence that no one hit 50 home runs last year after baseball took its first Neanderthal, kicking-and-screaming steps toward steroid testing.

Home runs had become so ho-hum in recent years there were thoughts about amending the scoring rules:

Ground-ball double play initiated by the shortstop: 6-4-3.

Any home run measured at more than 500 feet: T-H-G.

Once around the spring training bases ...

New York Yankee slugger Gary Sheffield, one of the players who testified in this BALCO mess, said he would urinate into a cup every day to prove he is clean.

Frankly, I prefer to remember the Whiz Kids as the 1950 Philadelphia Phillies.

Colorado pitcher Turk Wendell said it was pretty obvious Giant star Barry Bonds was taking steroids. Bonds said it’s pretty obvious he would not take seriously any criticism coming from anyone named “Turk.”

Houston Astro Jeff Kent, not exactly Bonds’ best friend when they were Giant teammates, said it was wrong to judge today’s players so harshly.

Kent said there was no way to prove Babe Ruth did not take steroids.

Forget that Kent is the same guy who once said that he broke his wrist washing his truck when it turned out he broke it doing a wheelie on his motorcycle. Does he have a point about Ruth?

The Bambino hit 54 home runs in 1920, more than every other team in the major leagues except one. The guy used a bat roughly the size of “Wee Willie” Keeler.

And what about the time Babe visited that sick boy, Jimmy, in the hospital?

Might Ruth have simply used that story as a ruse to cover the fact he was getting a steroid shot in the rump?

What about the Babe’s six-pack (Budweiser) physique?

Oh, never mind ...

Chicago Cub Manager Dusty Baker said suspicions over player steroid use smack of McCarthyism.

In case you’re not up on your history and were confused by Baker’s reference, Joe McCarthy was a Hall of Fame manager, winning seven World Series titles with the New York Yankees, including four straight from 1936 to 1939.

Here’s a shock: ESPN plans to make a movie on Pete Rose.

The cable network has decided on a title, “Hustle.”

A better title would have been “Bookmakers.”

Biggest question heard around the batting cage: Will Dodger closer Eric Gagne blow a save this year?

No, but chances are the Cubs will have to blow up another baseball.

The Yankees really look loaded this season and, thanks to random testing and Jason Giambi’s off-season appearance on “Extreme Makeover, The Baseball Episode,” I don’t mean that in an incriminating sense.

More second thoughts and dot, dot, dots ...

* Roof over Olympic Stadium in Athens nowhere near finished.

Relax. The Greeks say if construction is not completed in time, the Games will go on as scheduled and the edifice will simply be renamed Texasopoulos Stadium.

* USC receiver Mike Williams makes himself available for NFL draft.

Three reasons why Williams made the right decision:

3. Willis McGahee. The former Miami tailback has become the poster player for play-for-pay proponents. In the 2003 Fiesta Bowl, McGahee blew his knee out in the final quarter of his final college game, costing him millions of dollars in the draft.

If Williams could have improved his draft status from second round to the first, it would have been worth the chance to return for his junior season at USC.

But Williams is already a top-15, first-round pick, so why wait?

2. No more trips to Corvallis and Pullman.

1. No bowl championship series standings in the NFL.

* It’s possible no school from Indiana will qualify for this year’s NCAA men’s basketball tournament.

And you thought college basketball was down in Southern California?

Indiana not being able to produce an NCAA tournament team is like Wisconsin not being able to produce a milk cow.

Fifty years after the exploits of Milan High inspired the making of a famous sports movie, it might be time to start a rough draft for the sequel: “Loosiers.”

* College football may eliminate media guides.

Administrators think the guides are too costly, wildly out of control and more about recruiting than the media.

In other words, media guides are becoming too much like college football coaches.

* Veteran guard complains about his role in Laker offense.

Time to change the name of this season’s Laker soap opera from “As the World Turns” to “Payton Place.”