Grimsley tale just beginning of HGH story

PHILADELPHIA – This Jason Grimsley thing is perfect.

It marks a very public investigation into the use of human growth hormone, steroids, and pretty much everything else you can imagine by someone not named Barry Bonds. Even if Bonds remains a target of investigators, the news from Arizona indicates the feds’ focus is on following every lead, every thread, every paper trail – not just on Bonds.

The Grimsley investigation also turns the focus to HGH, which is very probably being used at this moment by football and basketball players as well as baseball players. The myth that urine testing has cleaned up pro sports, with baseball bringing up the rear, is now exposed.

Professional and Olympic sports are reduced to a perpetual Roadrunner cartoon. No matter what high-tech, gee-whiz gadget Wile E. Coyote orders up from the Acme Drug-Testing Company, no matter how close he comes, he will always wind up in a cloud of dust while the Roadrunner narrowly escapes.

Meep meep.

There is only so much you can say about this stuff. Once you call for baseball commissioner Bud Selig and players union chief Donald Fehr to resign in shame, as I did last year, there’s not much more you can suggest. These two have guided Major League Baseball into this mess, and for the most despicable of reasons.

Selig ignored the evidence in front of him because, after his bungling of the 1994 labor situation resulted in cancellation of the World Series, he was desperate for anything that might help bring the game back. The late 1990s power binge, now known to be a big steroidfest, did just that.

Fehr, who also had a hand in the ‘94 debacle, cares only about the upward spiral in player salaries. It clearly makes no difference to him or his union whether players do long-term damage to their bodies, as long as they put up numbers that win arbitration cases and jack up the market in free agency.

Actually, maybe resigning isn’t enough. Maybe these two should be prosecuted for gross negligence of the national pastime.

But they’re not alone in this. Logic tells you that if 38-year-old journeyman Jason Grimsley is using HGH, so are some of the biggest names in baseball, the NFL, the NBA and the NHL.

It really comes down to this: If no one is testing for it, someone is using it. And given the vast sums of money at stake and the culture of cheating, chances are that a whole lot of someones are using it.

There is no urine test for HGH, and the blood test is not exactly 100 percent reliable. This is because HGH is essentially a substance produced naturally in the body. Unlike some of the chemical steroids that turn up in urine screenings, HGH may never be reliably tested for.

So it’s simple-minded to blame Selig and Fehr for this particular development. The cheaters simply remain ahead of those trying to catch them, and that’s true across the board. Develop a test for HGH and some new product will appear.

That is why the investigators have had to resort to such public shaming of the athletes they are able to trip up with other means. The athletes caught up in the Balco investigation – from Bonds to Bill Romanowski to Marion Jones – got a taste of that. Any friend or teammate of Grimsley’s must now be sweating blood, knowing that the names crossed out of the documents filed in his investigation will almost certainly become public soon.

Remember all the athletes called to testify before the Balco grand jury? Even before details of the testimony began leaking, before we knew details, we knew their names. We’re about to learn a bunch more names.

That’s one way to combat this, as distasteful as it is from the perspective of respect for civil liberties.

But there’s another way, and this is where Selig and others really have to be held accountable.

According to Grimsley’s statements, as outlined in the search-warrant affidavit, people who work in major-league clubhouses have long provided illegal substances to players. When you go back to the Dowd report that brought down Pete Rose in the late 1980s, one of the shocking revelations was that Rose regularly brought lowlife gamblers and drug dealers, including steroid dealers, into the Cincinnati Reds’ clubhouse.

That was nearly two decades ago.

Baseball made some cosmetic changes, putting up more signs and making people sign their names before they entered the clubhouse. But if guys selling baseball bats and actual club employees have been the source of this stuff, then MLB is rotten through and through. We’re talking about a system-wide failure, with players, managers, GMs and even owners in on the cheating.

It’s going to take more than a blood test to fix that problem.