King Kaufman's Sports Daily

Baseball's drug scandal gets bigger again after a journeyman pitcher's house is raided. Nobody should be surprised.

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June 8, 2006 | Baseball's drug scandal has "widened" again, meaning that, as expected by all but the most naive, there are new revelations, new allegations, another round of astonishment that this whole thing doesn't stop at Barry Bonds' outsize head.

The Arizona Diamondbacks released journeyman relief pitcher Jason Grimsley at his request Thursday, two days after federal agents raided his house in search of evidence that he'd used and distributed performance-enhancing drugs and laundered money from their sale.

In April, after investigators confronted him at his house saying they knew he'd just received a shipment, Grimsley agreed to cooperate to avoid an immediate search of his house with guests present. He told the agents he had used steroids, amphetamines and human growth hormone, and he talked about other players who had done so also. A "boatload" of them, in fact.

A week later, Grimsley stopped cooperating.

An affidavit describing Grimsley's interview with agents, including IRS Special Agent Jeff Novitzky, a central figure in the BALCO investigation, was made public, with the names of those players Grimsley named blacked out.

"Grimsley stated that throughout the course of his Major League Baseball career, he has purchased and used the athletic performance-enhancing drugs, anabolic steroids, amphetamines, Clenbuterol, and human growth hormone," Novitzky writes in the affidavit. There's a brief play-by-play of what drugs Grimsley used when, and then, the key sentence:

"Grimsley stated that since Major League Baseball began its drug testing for steroids and amphetamines, the only drug that he has used is human growth hormone."

Baseball, like the other major American sports, doesn't test for HGH. There is no urine test for it, and the players union won't go for blood testing. Even if it did, the blood test for HGH isn't universally accepted as reliable.

So there it is. That's what testing does. This is where a law-enforcement approach to the drug problem gets you. It makes the bad guys change their ways.

The cheaters are always about three steps ahead of the cops. When the cops get close, the cheaters put the moves on. The users look for new drugs to use. The chemists get to work trying to oblige them. And the cops are busy holding press conferences every time they pick off some straggler from the herd who's still on the old stuff.

I'm talking about baseball, but I could also be talking about the larger drug war.

Baseball was rightly criticized for years for first ignoring the drug problem, happy to enjoy the economic fruits of juiced-up sluggers setting home run records, and then hoping it would just go away. People still hammering at baseball for having its head in the sand are fighting the last war. Baseball's trying to deal with the problem. It's just racing down the wrong road.

Next page: So what's the answer? Good question. Baseball's don't ask-don't tell drug culture is deep and wide