The stain on the game

Baseball has a scarred history. Virtually since its beginning, gambling, strikes, racial strife and substance abuse have left their ugly marks on the game that endures, regardless, in millions of hearts as the national pastime.

But baseball's biggest test could begin today.

The U.S. House Government Reform Committee begins hearing testimony from baseball players and officials about steroid use, a dark subject that Major League Baseball officials and players have alternately turned their backs on and pounced on.

Many people - most recently columnist George F. Will, on this page Tuesday - mock the idea of such hearings, as if anyone should dare question the operation of something as simon-pure as Major League Baseball. The committee is just grandstanding, they say.

But let's call these hearings what they are. This isn't about the federal government trying to hold sway over baseball. This is about shining a flashlight into a beloved sport's darkest crevices to see what skitters out.

Consider also that MLB has enjoyed a sweet antitrust exemption from the government for decades. Despite that - or perhaps, more importantly, because of that - baseball officials and players are obligated to now share all they know about the depth of steroid use.

MLB's recent efforts to combat steroids through random drug testing are the best they've been, but they still ring a bit hollow considering that baseball officials spent years denying it had a problem at all.

Also, despite MLB's recently ratified tougher penalties for steroid use, they still pack the power of a Pee-Wee League bunt. The first-offense punishment for a baseball player who tests positive for steroids is a 10-day suspension. Here's that penalty written another way: Millionaire athletes caught using steroids get 10 days off from work.

What kind of punishment is that? We're talking about super-rich, super-privileged super-athletes. They simply don't share the same kinds of professional and financial vulnerabilities with the general work force. Ask a fast-food employee how a 10-day suspension without pay would affect his finances.

MLB might want to shop around for a real template on which to model hard-nosed drug enforcement. Maybe the International Olympic Committee would like to share details of its policy on first-offense steroid users: a two-year suspension.

The problem is that serious, folks. Prolonged steroid use leads to a laundry list of health problems from stunted bone growth, heart disease and liver damage to impotence, kidney problems and hormonal imbalances. All that isn't worth a higher batting average, and rising generations of young athletes need to be told that. Today's hearings are a start.

Steroids are a growing stain on sports, and athletes use these performance-enhancers in misguided attempts to divorce themselves from the concepts of honesty and fair play. The House committee conducting the investigation rightly calls it a "scandal." And baseball must be held accountable.