The following editorial appeared in the Chicago Tribune on Friday.

Almost every time San Francisco Giants slugger Barry Bonds plays away from the home crowd in San Francisco, he is met with a vociferous medley of boos. Signs of “cheater” sprout in the stands like dandelions on a summer lawn, a constant reminder of the evidence that Bonds’ pursuit of Henry Aaron’s career home run record has been fueled by the use of steroids.

Many baseball fans obviously think it is well past time for Bonds, now 41 and struggling through a raft of injuries, to exit stage left, without encore or bow. But something happened last week to remind us that Bonds’ departure, whenever it finally comes, is hardly going to be enough to exorcise baseball of chemically enhanced cheats.

Federal agents on Tuesday searched the Scottsdale home of Jason Grimsley, a journeyman pitcher who admitted in April that he had used anabolic steroids, amphetamines and, most recently, human growth hormone. A day after the search, Grimsley asked for and received his release from the Arizona Diamondbacks. The story, though, is unlikely to end there. Grimsley apparently named names, giving federal agents a list of other players who, he says, use performance-enhancing drugs.

Grimsley also confirmed what many people in baseball had feared all along – that some players, faced with Major League Baseball’s tougher steroid policy, would switch to a drug like HGH, for which the game does not yet test.

Ridding baseball of HGH abusers is not going to be easy. HGH cannot be detected with a urine test. A blood test, though used by the World Anti-Doping Agency since the 2004 Olympics, is not widely available, nor accepted as reliable, especially by MLB and the players union.

By the time researchers do come up with an HGH test everyone can agree on, enterprising players will likely have moved on to the next great chemical advance.

Sometimes, it can seem tempting to just throw up one’s hands and give up the fight, especially when keeping up with the cheaters can seem so much like tilting at windmills.

But allowing cheaters to take over the game would violate the implicit contract of a level playing field on which all players compete.

It is fair to expect a major-leaguer to work harder in the weight room to keep up with his peers. A bench press, after all, never killed anyone. It is not fair to expect a player to have to choose between losing his job to a cheater or ingesting and injecting drugs that could kill him.

When players began abusing steroids in significant numbers, Major League Baseball had to be dragged into dealing forcefully with the issue. This time, even with the challenges that ferreting out HGH presents, we hope that Commissioner Bud Selig and company decide to lead.