Black day? Hardly: Baseball purging black decade

And while you had to be in severe denial to not suspect Bonds wasn't at least part synthetic, San Francisco nonetheless played to 33 consecutive sellouts while Bonds was approaching and then breaking Hank Aaron's all-time home run record last summer -- including 16 packed houses on the road.

A black day for baseball?

So many players suffered such serious damage to their reputations that they could have filled at least three major-league clubhouses. At the very least, it was a black day for Clemens, because those who don't plan to vote for Bonds in future Hall of Fame elections -- and I'm one of them -- had damn well better adjust their thinking on the Rocket now.

But after a renegade decade or more of lawlessness and chemistry, and of baseball's impotence in the face of it, this was a day in which the game's greater good was served.

As Selig rightly said when asked what the total bill for the investigation would be, the cost would have been higher had baseball continued to ignore this sorry part of its past.

"There are some things in life you have to do because it's the right thing to do," Selig said in what might have been an enlightening day's most lucid moment.

And if it wasn't, this was:

"The reality that hundreds of thousands of our children are using," Mitchell said of steroids during his report, "every American, not just baseball fans, ought to be shocked into action by that disturbing truth."