Issue Is No Longer Under Radar

The men in the straw hats and breezy shirts, the collars turned up against the Arizona sun, gazed at the numbers in the box and squinted.

Eighty-six?

They waited for another fastball and read the numbers in the box again.

Eighty-seven?

They leaned over a seat to the next guy. Same brand of radar gun, same number. Their eyes met, suspicious.

The man on the pitcher’s mound was Jason Grimsley, right? The same Jason Grimsley?

Over the last four or five years, depending on the usual variables -- sore arm, heavy workload, cold, time of year -- several scouts said they’d come to expect Grimsley’s fastball in the range of 91 to 94 mph, occasionally rising to 95 in an especially critical moment.

This spring, however, Grimsley’s once-reliable heater barely got out of the mid-80s, and a scout who’d seen him recently said Grimsley’s fastball fluttered in the high 80s, 91 tops.

In a spring training spent scratching his head, wondering where all the fastballs had gone, this scout called Grimsley “blatantly one of the guys who I wondered about.”

A well-traveled right-hander who’d failed as a starter but had made a comfortable living in bullpens all over the game, Grimsley, at 38, was aging by the game’s standards. So, scouts for pitching-deprived organizations, knowing Grimsley might be available by the end of spring or in the early months of the regular season, asked themselves the now-common questions:

* Has his arm simply run out of innings?

* Is he a former juicer scared clean by the new steroid policy?

* When’s the next shipment arrive?

Turns out, it was April 19.

The feds, though, beat the scouts to Grimsley’s door.

In researching a preseason article for this newspaper that examined the difficulty in evaluating players in the testing era, over dozens of phone calls to scouts, Grimsley’s name became a regular.

Different guy, they said. Suspicious, they believed. Still on or coming down, they suspected.

There were many others, some pitching or playing in this town. Presumably, some are unfairly accused, while others glide along beneath the radar of drug enforcement and the game’s own probe and testing safeguards.

“In Grimsley, we saw as much sinker, but not nearly as much fastball,” a scout said. “There are a lot of guys like this that we’re starting to see regressions in velocity.”

So, Jason Grimsley did it.

And, according to the feds he sang to, the Diamondbacks pitcher didn’t just dabble, he did it by the mailbox-full, knew others who did it, and maybe helped them do it.

This is an alarming -- if not quite unexpected -- development, and might just kill any hope we have of convincing the players’ union that steroids have any more influence over the game than a pack of Camels.

Because Jason Grimsley would jack himself up on steroids by month, amphetamines by day, and in the sixth inning, after all that cheating, he was still Jason Grimsley, journeyman chuck-and-ducker.

At $1,600 a pop, he probably bought himself a few more big league seasons. He won. He beat Commissioner Bud Selig’s system. He got one more paycheck upon his release from the Diamondbacks, and will get his pension.

Yeah, he got caught. No, he probably won’t be able to call those buddies investigators allege he ratted out. Yeah, he’ll have to replace the front door knocked down by a battering ram during Tuesday’s raid.

Victor Conte, the man who founded BALCO and helped stoke the designer-steroid craze, served a few months in prison, is all. The man’s handiwork can be found all over American and international sport, in championship rings and on medal stands. Someday, maybe, it will be found in autopsies, as well.

What does Grimsley, one guy working the system, have to fear? Some embarrassment? Disqualification from the alumni golf tournament? A few tough questions from his kids one day?

So now let us get over the notion that the game’s drug problem has been exaggerated, that George Mitchell’s investigation is pointless, that the scandal could be contained in the middle of batting orders.

Leading with their subpoenas, federal investigators are taking names, presumably in every sport. So while baseball seems to take the congressional and WADA bullets every time this happens, the next detainee might be one of your quarterbacks, Mr. Tagliabue. Or one of your power forwards, Mr. Stern.

Selig is funding a study to develop a urine test to detect HGH, primarily because his experts tell him blood tests are unreliable. Of course the boys over at WADA scoff at this, which, presumably, is easier than trying to help.

Asked this week exactly how much he’d pledged to UCLA Dr. Don Catlin’s study, Selig said, “Whatever it’s going to take.” The initial grant is believed to be for $450,000.

Meanwhile, baseball would be wise to go to blood testing and to start saving samples, even if that means finding space in the freezer for 10,000 vials a year, because no player wants to go through what is coming for Grimsley and others like him, even walking through the retirement door.

Friends of Grimsley’s were mortified, of course. Shocked. Maybe it’s because Grimsley kept it a secret for so long, and maybe because they fear what’s on the other side of those black marks on the affidavit.

But if they had any questions, they could have gone to the scouts. Because, for the users and former users out there, it’s beginning to show.