Feds making high-priced mistakes chasing steroids cheats
By Monte Poole

The most decorated pitcher in baseball history, a suspected steroids user, strolled out of a Washington courtroom a few days ago smirking as he walked along the sidewalk signing autographs.

The most decorated hitter ever, an admitted steroids user, in mid-April walked out of a San Francisco courtroom a felon yet two months later sat at AT&T Park enjoying a Giants-Twins game.

The only superstar known to test dirty twice decided in early April, after his second positive test, to put away his equipment and quit.

Manny Ramirez never even reached the courtroom, yet he's not appreciably better off than Roger Clemens or Barry Bonds.

The basic lesson is suspected sports cheaters don't go to prison, not that most of us thought they should. No, they just glide into the sunset -- after burning through millions in government dollars, when by all accounts those dollars are more precious than ever.

Beyond the basic lesson, though, is the moral that baseball, for all its legitimate faults, can police itself at least as well as the federal government ever could.

Bonds' obstruction of justice conviction, which he is appealing, is all the feds have to show for thousands of man-hours and millions in expenses spent to prosecute the biggest names of the steroids era. Sluggers Sammy Sosa and Rafael Palmeiro are free men, as are pitchers Eric Gagne and Andy Pettitte.

Miguel Tejada and Jason Giambi continue to earn big league salaries and command the price of a ticket.

Does anyone believe baseball's War on Drugs, conceived by an assiduous media and implemented by an agitated federal government, was even remotely successful?

Baseball itself presents the best and perhaps only argument in that regard, having rinsed off the slime that defined it through the 1990s and into the new millennium. With balls sailing over fences with unprecedented frequency, mesmerizing fans at attendance-record rates, baseball was never more irresistible than when it was dirty. That it's relatively clean now, thanks to drug-testing and the threat of suspension, is less the result of federal prosecutors than of the dogged media who have shamed all involved parties into addressing the fraudulence they perpetrated.

Home runs are down among leading sluggers as well as the middle-infielder types who not long ago sent opposite-field blasts into the seats. Pitchers aren't vaulting from obscurity to blow away hitters, as Gagne did. Statistics are back within typical ranges.

On the surface, at least, sanity has been restored. The game is not nearly as exciting as those fireworks displays of yore, but it's more genuine.

That's the reward, and maybe it's enough. The overriding purpose of laws and policies is, after all, not to fill prisons but to beget a more virtuous society. Specifically, in this case, to have fewer cheats.

Though this might satisfy the reformers, it likely won't assuage the indignant members of the angry little mob determined to see that punishment for the cheaters is exacted beyond baseball, into a court of law.

They longed for Bonds, a seven-time MVP, and Clemens, a seven-time Cy Young Award winner, to be penalized. They wanted Ramirez and the others, the whole sacrilegious lot of them, so brazenly trampling over hallowed tradition and legacy, to be labeled criminals forever.

Bonds has, for now, a felony conviction on his record. Would anyone be surprised if, however, it is overturned?

Would anyone be surprised if after all the rumor and innuendo, all the ranting and bluster, all the investigating and interrogating, all the irritation accompanied by occasional flickers of public outrage, no one serves a minute behind bars?

Hey, the players paid a price, paid it long before they were forced to go out and hire expensive lawyers. The stigma attached to suspicions and, in some cases, positive drug tests, will not go away. Hall of Fame inductions are imperiled, if not canceled. They live with bloated statistics that don't fool the discerning fan.

Clemens walked, probably for good. Bonds might yet walk for good. Ramirez and dozens of others walked, almost certainly for good.

They know, however, their every step is accompanied by the torched reputations that come with disgrace.

They won't let that bother them, though, because it was true years before the investment of so much money and energy in search of something more.