This May Take Them Out of the Ballgame

Baseball’s steroid era ended at that gavel Thursday night.

The echo had barely died in that Rayburn building hearing room, Mark McGwire’s reputation dissolving into the air with it, when the drumbeat began.

Rep. Henry A. Waxman (D-Los Angeles) had all but asked for Commissioner Bud Selig’s resignation.

McGwire, who once lifted the game and drew a nation’s admiration, was finished.

Ill, union chief Don Fehr waved off post-hearing questions, looking tired and weak and not at all up to a fight.

The congressmen who lord over the House Government Reform Committee called it the first inning of nine, a trite analogy for a membership that often stumbled over the pronunciations of the famous before them; Selig, Fehr, Palmeiro and even, incredibly, Sosa.

“Is it Se-lig or See-lig?” one asked. “Mr. So-so,” began one, undoubtedly thinking of the player who eight years ago had never hit more than 40 home runs. “Mr. Fur,” said one whose cable TV package must not include ESPN.

But they promised more, including future invitations for Barry Bonds, and perhaps another crack at Jason Giambi, whose entanglement in the BALCO investigation for the moment kept him from entanglement in the congressional investigation.

Steroids won’t leave baseball. The specter of two-year -- or lifetime -- bans have not rid the Olympics of cheaters. NFL players seem perfectly willing to risk a quarter of their season. Every year, it seems, before Lance Armstrong thins the Tour de France peloton, drug tests do it for him.

Congress, despite its threats, will not rewrite federal labor laws to keep a few baseballs in the ballpark. Bonds will not refuse his next delivery of flaxseed oil because the game could lose its antitrust exemption over it.

The frauds are addicted to their bodies, to their mirrors, to their superiority over the man in the next locker. It is easier their way, tapping air bubbles from syringes that hold undeserved fame and corner-bought achievement.

But, however heavy-handed and self-possessed, Congress had its impact. Steroids won’t leave the era, but the era could slowly leave steroids. The image of McGwire stammering, Canseco blinking hard enough to shatter his cheekbones, the rest of them standing with their right hands in the air, dragged into the scandal by association and circumstance, is a pretty fair deterrent.

Baseball was a decade late to the steroid issue but still beat Congress there by a few weeks, and now appears to have been pushed into a place of education and dedication to a stronger policy. Selig has no other choice, of course. The steroid era not only didn’t cost baseball a single game ticket, it made Selig and his owners rich, but now the public has seen the faces of parents who lost sons to steroids, and the faces of their heroes unable, or unwilling, to defend their decisions.

Maybe, just because of that, a handful of big leaguers took their final injection Wednesday night.

Maybe a handful of parents went through their teenagers’ sock drawers looking for needles.

Maybe Giambi, this morning, told some Yankee minor leaguer that it’s not worth it, that he once feared a tumor in his pituitary gland would kill him before he was 35, that he still wonders if he hasn’t set off some terrible chemical sequence that has doomed him.

Maybe Curt Schilling, who once told a reporter that steroids were widespread in the game and then told Congress he wouldn’t know a steroid if he saw it, will get his story straight.

It is a start. It is momentum.

Baseball’s drug policy probably will look the same as it did Thursday morning, and a good many of baseball’s players will too. The policy is a decent one, though, better than Congress portrayed it Thursday afternoon, if worse than Selig portrayed it Thursday night.

The punishment for first- and second-time offenses is ridiculously soft. The time has come for blood testing, no matter how invasive the union views it. The game and the union have lost their privileges to privacy.

If the next generation of players finds that unfair, they can find the blame for it on the witness list of Thursday’s hearing. Or in the record books of their own sport. Or, sadly, on a handful of plaques at the Hall of Fame.

Baseball history will place the beginning of the end of the steroid era in the early months of 2005. It will note that Bonds caught Ruth and Aaron in a climate of suspicion, that he redirected that as racism or jealousy or whatever occurred to him at the moment.

There will be others held up to the same scorn, among them McGwire, who when asked Thursday if he believed taking steroids constituted cheating, testified, “That’s not for me to say.”

Then history will say it for him. Starting now.