And now you know why they call it dope

SEATTLE – And in its latest urine opera, baseball has snagged another platoon of drug violators, including the mascot of the Lansing Lugnuts, one of the rowboat people in McCovey Cove and Scotty and Squints from “The Sandlot.”

Oh, yes, and half the Seattle Mariners’ farm system.

Just no one that, you know, anybody cares about.

Not that anyone seems to care, period. In San Francisco on Tuesday, human Petri dish Barry Bonds – who admitted in grand jury testimony that he used substances provided by his buddies at BALCO that have been identified as steroids, though he claims not to have known what they were at the time – was serenaded with another enthusiastic standing ovation. The message being that in pursuit of both victories and hallowed records, it is proper and laudable to use illegal drugs, as long as you play for the old town team.

If this is an OK way into Cooperstown, then why not breaking and entering?

In any event, center stage of the drug drama has now shifted from the Bay Area courts to the halls of Congress to Seattle, if only because the list of 38 minor leaguers scooped up by Bud Selig’s paddywagon included eight Mariners farmhands, the most of any club.

So far. This was only a partial list of cheats from the first batch of spring tests, and only for a handful of teams training in Arizona. Like Seattle’s early jump in the American League West, this lead isn’t expected to last, either.

The reaction of the M’s leadership to the 15-game suspensions meted out bore the tone of Capt. Renault – shocked, shocked that gambling was going on in their establishment, seeing as how the fact of testing has been open policy in the minors for a year now and everybody should have known better.

Then again, why do you think they call it dope?

General manager Bill Bavasi: “We’re obviously disappointed that we have anybody – we’re not happy about it at all. On the other side of the coin, like everybody else, we want this to be cleaned up and taken care of. The best way to do that is to test.”

Manager Mike Hargrove: “I know as much about as what was in the paper – I don’t know the particulars. I was surprised at some of the names. Disappointed. Bill said it best – disappointed and angry. Obviously there’s no place in our game, or life, for this kind of thing and that’s really about all I can say. The stuff needs to be cleaned up and eradicated and I think we’re going about trying to get it done.”

When Hargrove said he was “surprised at some of the names,” it’s hard to know what he meant – whether he suspected different players might have been juicers or that so modest were the offenders’ builds and statistics that it’s obvious the needles and pills haven’t done them any good.

Renee Cortez is a 178-pound pitcher. Omar Falcon is a catcher who in five seasons didn’t get any higher than A ball and last year hit all of .222. Jesus Guzman is a 165-pound infielder. Billy Hogan has seven minor league home runs in three years.

But it’s probably true that now with at least a bunny-slope testing program in effect in the major leagues, the most likely chance takers will be the marginal talents and other souls desperate to try anything to get them within a sniff of big-league riches – and not those who’ve already signed their big contracts.

The only two names of any note at all on the list of suspended Mariners were Australian pitcher Damian Moss, who won 22 big league games with four clubs, and catcher Ryan Christianson, Seattle’s first-round draft choice in 1999 who has been mostly injured for three years and a significant disappointment.

In more ways than one.

Christianson, assigned to the Triple-A club in Tacoma, told the Seattle Times that he’d been taking supplements that he thought contained creatine and glutamine, among other things, to make him stronger and recover more quickly after workouts.

“I didn’t know I was taking anything on the ban list,” he told the newspaper. “This is a big shock. I didn’t want to be one of the guys to be looked down upon.”

Hargrove apparently did a brow clench at that.

“I read some of the quotes Ryan Christianson had,” Hargove said. “It sounds to me … I don’t know … I’ll just leave it at that.”

Mariners president Chuck Armstrong didn’t. He got on the radio Tuesday morning and called Christianson’s remarks “a cop out” – which would seem to put a nice bow on the chunky catcher’s Mariners career.

Moss, too, used the supplement alibi – but he wouldn’t reveal who distributed them, telling the Times he didn’t want to get any companies in trouble.

Riiiiiight.

The thing is, so ridiculously ungoverned and unstandardized is the supplement trade that even if some of these dopes bothered to read the labels, they still may have had no idea what they were taking.

Interestingly enough, the back-page sponsor of the Mariners media guide is a supplement maker – and while surely the club checked and double-checked the products before entering into any sort of commercial agreement, common sense suggests that the next batch of fat-burning shake be sent off to the lab for yet another look. And the next one after that. For as the wording on the guide says, “These statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration.”

The earlier suspension of Tampa Bay outfielder Alex Sanchez – the first major leaguer caught under the new policy – has prompted Selig to crow that it’s proof the system is working. Of course, Selig also fluffed up his feathers and said that the minor-league testing program had virtually eliminated the use of steroids and other synthetic boosters. Except that four percent of 925 players sampled just tested positive.

Uh, Bud, when there are no violators – doesn’t that prove it’s working?

There are lots of things to get riled about these days – from gas prices to political hacks trying to make hay off a doomed woman to all manner of daily fraud. Steroids in sports make the list mostly because of the trickle-down dangers being visited upon our children. Alas, the notion of fair play probably received its fatal blow when Gaylord Perry slid into the Hall of Fame on a magic carpet of spit and Vaseline.

Taking away the records of a disingenuous oaf like Mark McGwire might make you like baseball more, but not doing so won’t keep you from visiting the ballpark – at least not as much, a recent poll revealed, as the players’ offensive salaries.

Maybe that’s dumb. But certainly it’s no dumber than a ballplayer who, fully aware he’ll be handed a specimen cup, still shrugs and swallows the pill anyway.