Let’s strike out names from steroid use report

When I was 10 or so, I gave my parents a plaque for Christmas that read “Today is the tomorrow you worried about yesterday.” Although initially confused about the inherent time-travel element, I eventually figured it out and adopted the slogan as my credo. The thing hung in the kitchen forever.

Today is one of those days for a lot of major-leaguers.

It marks the long-awaited moment when the other shoe drops on baseball fans everywhere. It’s the day we’re supposed to get the names from among the current generation of ballplayers linked to steroid use.

Published accounts Wednesday about the Mitchell Report (headed by former U.S. Sen. George Mitchell, not former Giants left fielder Kevin Mitchell) speculated it would include bombshell stuff -- perhaps as many as 80 names, including some stars.

Bombshells? Is there any level of scandalous news the beaten-up American public can’t handle? I haven’t trusted anyone in public life since learning that Milli Vanilli didn’t sing on its records. And that was in 1990.

Before Bill Clinton.

As for baseball, my naivete took a drubbing in 1974, when I ventured into my first major-league clubhouse. I’d wangled a press pass for a key late-season series in St. Louis between the Cardinals and my longtime favorite team, the Pirates. The game had been tense for me -- Pittsburgh won -- and I went into the Cardinal clubhouse to watch the assembled Redbirds suffer.

What I remember instead was a bunch of major-leaguers standing side by side in front of mirrors and blow-drying their hair. Blow-dryers? In the locker room? Wearing the same uniforms the Gas House Gang had worn in the ‘30s?

Some of the offending Cardinals were stars. Unlike George Mitchell, however, I won’t name names.

And in what I’m sure is a minority opinion, I wish Mitchell weren’t naming names today, either.

I trotted out that idea a few months ago, and it’s safe to say it didn’t catch on. Maybe it’s because I’m not a sportswriter. Maybe people didn’t think I knew which end was up.

I favor amnesty, if you will -- a general statement that identifies the years in which steroid use tainted baseball and its statistics but which spares the players a trip to the public gallows.

I’d settle for something like this: “Between 1995 and 2005, major league baseball was chemically altered by steroid use, in many cases by some of the game’s most well-known players. Dozens of players used performance-enhancing drugs. We blame the players, their union, the teams’ management and the commissioner’s office for turning a blind eye to what should have been obvious.”

To my way of thinking, that is what’s important -- that the game itself was knocked out of whack.

I realize my amnesty lets bad guys off the hook and puts innocent players under suspicion. But even if the Mitchell Report names players, can we be sure that no one else belongs on the list? Probably not.

I’m certainly not protecting any Pirates. With 15 straight losing seasons and counting, Pirate players must have ordered “performance-diminishing” supplements by mis- take.

All I’m arguing from my tiny little corner of the world is that it’s the “era” of steroids that needs to be identified for posterity.

As for the individual players, it’s hard to assess exact blame because some probably justified their usage on the grounds that they thought everyone else was doing it.

Nor will we be able to determine exactly what percentage of their statistics ought to be downgraded because of steroids. And since we can’t do that, naming names becomes only juicy fodder.

Sure, I’ll get some titillation out of seeing the “surprise” names on the list. Yet I don’t thirst for reading the names.

What I thirst for is a return to the baseball I have always loved. A game where statistics from decade to decade can be compared with one another.

A game where average-sized guys can play on the same field with the bigger boys. A game where the only suspicions or doubts are whether your team can ever drive in a guy from third base with the game on the line.

A game where, alas, the worst thing players do is blow-dry their hair.

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Dana Parsons’ column appears Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays. He can be reached at (714) 966-7821 or at dana.parsons@latimes.com. An archive of his recent columns is at www.latimes.com/parsons.