MLB's gross steroid-era stain defies containment

Ozzie Guillen and Lou Piniella want to get this over with. They'd prefer for the names of all 104 players who tested positive in 2003, the first year of drug testing in Major League Baseball, to come out now rather than leaking slowly and painfully through the media. The Chicago managers aren't alone. Some players and media members also called on baseball to release the full list after a New York Times story identified Sammy Sosa as one of the 104.

It's understandable that people would want the whole truth and consider it unfair for Sosa and Alex Rodriguez to have been cited while 102 other players have retained the confidentiality they were promised when they urinated into a specimen cup six years ago. But most of the people who support releasing the names simply want to be done with the scandal, and they're willing to take a shortcut to the finish line.

Sammy Sosa and MLB's visit to Capitol Hill was supposed to be the end. It wasn't. (Getty Images)

Their ethics are appalling. MLB agreed to keep that list a secret, and no matter how many leaks occur, the commissioner's office still has to honor the deal. A child could tell you this: 102 more wrongs won't make things right.

Besides, if MLB headquarters could void a contractual promise of that magnitude, simply on the theory that it would serve the best interests of the game, then all guaranteed contracts worth more than, say, $20 million should be voidable, too. It's certainly bad for the game to have certain teams stuck with injured or underperforming players eating up the bulk of the payroll.

What baseball needs to understand is that the doping issue, once it burrows under a sport's skin, defies closure. It ain't over 'til it's over, and it's never, ever absolutely over.

The International Olympic Committee thought it hit bottom when Ben Johnson tested positive in Seoul. The champion in the 100-meter dash, the glamour event of the 1988 Summer Games, had been busted. The worst of it had to be over. Athletes couldn't possibly keep doping and think they'd get away with it.

Almost 20 years later, the IOC was revoking Marion Jones' medals and admitting that it didn't quite know how to re-assign some of them because too many of her competitors had been tainted by doping as well.

In 1998, French police raided cyclists' hotels on the route of the Tour de France, following up on a border drug bust of a Belgian aide to one of the teams, whose car was loaded with performance-enhancing substances. After the most aggressive investigation in the history of the event, many Tour fans insisted that the raids would scare potential cheaters straight in the future.

Nine years later, the race organizers would be booting the pre-race favorite because of doping connections. Then the holder of the yellow jersey through Stage 16 would be yanked by his own team, which decided that he had fabricated explanations for missing drug tests earlier in the year.

In the intervening years, an Olympic gold-medal-winning cyclist (Tyler Hamilton) would be suspended for blood doping, the 2006 Tour de France champion (Floyd Landis) would lose his title when he tested positive for artificial testosterone, and the 1996 Tour champ (Bjarne Riis) would belatedly confess to using an endurance drug.

Let's not forget the 2002 third-place finisher, Lithuanian Raimondas Rumsas, whose wife was accused of transporting a cooler full of performance-enhancers and sent to a Lyon jail cell until authorities could bring her husband in. He bolted the country and left her behind bars for 2½ months until the French police gave up and set her free.

Chivalry in these matters, it turns out, died long before Roger Clemens told Congress that the only growth hormone injected in his household ended up in wife Debbie, who wanted to look hot in the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue. He ended up on Capitol Hill three years after Sosa, Mark McGwire, Rafael Palmeiro, Curt Schilling and Jose Canseco. Their performance, especially McGwire's stonewalling, was supposed to be baseball's ultimate humiliation. Then the Mitchell Report was the final word.

But the hits keep on coming. Bud Selig loves to sell the theory that the steroid era has passed. So how did Manny Ramirez test positive in 2009? If he wasn't deterred, or at least diverted to drugs that the screenings can't yet pick up, why would we believe that virtually everyone else has been?

The temptations of chemical enhancement are simply too great, the rewards too lavish, for the entire drug culture to disappear from a sport. Rather than extolling a testing program that still has serious limitations (because they all do), Selig might want to embrace humility. He can acknowledge, as the Tour de France director finally did, that the fight against doping will be an ongoing struggle.

Instead of declaring victories, he can promise vigilance. Players will take the threat of detection a lot more seriously if the game's leaders stop trying to tie doping up into a package, into a single era that can be dumped like toxic waste at a landfill.

Gwen Knapp is a sports columnist at the San Francisco Chronicle