Belatedly, They’re Off on a Wild Juice Chase

Bud Selig stood in his corner office overlooking Park Avenue on Thursday afternoon, hands jammed deep into the pockets of his suit pants.

Down the hall, George Mitchell and, by Selig’s estimate, eight other investigators had begun the process that will probably reveal Barry Bonds, Rafael Palmeiro, Jason Giambi, Jose Canseco, Ken Caminiti and a lot of players like them artificially stoked their careers.

OK.

Presumably, the I-team is getting decent money for what Congress, the San Francisco Chronicle, even baseball did for their regular pay, but, hey, Bud’s feeling extravagant.

Besides, what was the man to do?

He should have hired Mitchell five years ago, when we really would have learned something.

That he didn’t then, however, is a terrible reason for why he shouldn’t now.

Selig made his usual points this week: The owners (his bosses) didn’t know; the general managers (their employees) didn’t know. There was his guided tour of the nutrition store near Wrigley Field, where the shelves were stacked with Andro and other products that one day would crowd baseball’s banned list. And his fallback, that significant modifications to the sport’s charter -- such as having players urinate into a plastic cup while other men observe -- are collectively bargained, not the consequence of a wave of his hand.

To stand in a room with the man is to know he really believes it. Maybe that’s unnerving. It’s also true.

But, with the investigation nearly half an hour old, he stopped. He conceded.

“You can say we should have picked up on things earlier,” he said, softer than he’d said anything all day. “I can accept that. I can understand. I’ve asked myself that question over and over again.”

All right?

I’ve got no problem with Mitchell or the two stoic guys who framed the featured speakers at Thursday’s news conference. Mitchell is 72, probably proud of most of his professional career.

I doubt he’d take this gig because old pal Bud needed a favor, that it was agreed he’d come back soft, and in return he’d forfeit the credibility of a life’s work. Even if the first 300 pages of the investigation have already been written for him -- it’s on the nonfiction shelf, senator -- the money can’t be that good.

If Mitchell and the others come back in six months or a year shaking their heads, the first hours of ridicule alone would carry them out of town and the game wouldn’t have lost a thing.

So we’ll see. We’ll see what the investigation holds. We’ll see what Selig does about it.

As one player agent said, “I see a lot of dancing, but I don’t hear any music.”

And that’s fine.

The harm to the game has been done and might still be advancing. While everybody would feel better if baseball and the union inched ahead and tested for the likes of human growth hormone and the steroid DHEA, there is little wrong in picking through the careers of players who claim they have nothing to hide, along with those who cower behind their attorneys, and through an era that has seen the last of the fawning documentaries.

The argument that the past is past, and that baseball’s only agenda should be defending the game from the future BALCOs, is as narrow as Bud’s shoulders. The game can do both, if it wants.

The special thing about baseball is, the past is the present. That the harshest media critics of this investigation have stumped for preserving the careers of Babe Ruth and Hank Aaron for half a decade is, at best, paradoxical. That the rest are ballplayers is absurdly predictable.

Players will refuse to cooperate, of course. They’ll lawyer up, band together, learn the Fifth Amendment, all that.

Fine. We’ll expect to read about that in the report.

It is unlikely there will be punishments for those Mitchell finds guilty of poking themselves with needles.

But maybe we’ll know more. The voters for the Hall of Fame will know more. We are in the information business.

There could be nothing in Mitchell’s investigation that would cast the last decade as anything other than what it was: a time of unethical and, at times, criminal behavior by players, unchecked by those who run the game and the union.

The players who soiled the game, who minimized the careers of players who came before them and who will come later, should be held as accountable as the commissioner, the owners and the players’ union, all of whom now carry the blame for letting it get this far.

If that’s scapegoating, so be it. I want to know.