Major League Baseball (MLB) suffers from quite a few maladies. The sport has yet to fully recover from the work stoppage that wiped out the 1994 World Series. For Commissioner Bud Selig, it’s a constant uphill road, in an attempt to return the game to its once enjoyed status atop the sporting world.

Now, another black-eye is looming for the once proud Great American Pastime.

The career home-run record is the pinnacle of MLB achievements.

Hank Aaron currently holds the record with 755. With 703 home-runs coming into the 2005 season, San Francisco Giants’ outfielder Barry Bonds will break that record, possibly this year.

Here’s where things get muddy. In a 2003 grand-jury appearance, Bonds admitted to taking steroids. While Bonds pleaded ignorance regarding what he used, few doubt that he unknowingly took steroids.

Bonds appeared before a grand jury regarding the federal government’s ongoing investigation of the Bay Area Laboratory Co-Operative, better known BALCO.

Essentially, Conte and BALCO created an undetectable steroid called “the clear.” Through his personal trainer, Greg Anderson, Bonds became involved with BALCO.

BALCO’s web has ensnared athletes from several sports. Other prominent baseball players caught up in the BALCO scandal include New York Yankee outfielder Gary Sheffield, and his teammate, first baseman Jason Giambi, the 2000 American League Most Valuable Player.

Giambi’s case is interesting. Always a big guy, he reported to spring training last year dramatically thinner.

He initially attributed his slimmer self to the Atkins Diet. As the season wore on his absences from the line up grew more frequent, and the reasons the Yankees gave for them became more vague.

Giambi played in only 80 games during the whole 2004 season, hitting a paltry 12 home runs. There were whispers that his problems were complications resulting from steroid use.

Those whispers grew louder, when his admission of steroid use to the BALCO grand jury was leaked in the fall of last year. However, Giambi did not play the ignorance card as Bonds did.

The worst part about these admissions is that there’s nothing MLB administrators could have done about it, even if they had known it was going on at the time.

Until the recent revelations, MLB’s steroid policy was laughable at best.

Under the old policy, there was no provision for a player suspension until the second offense, nor was random testing allowed.

The new rules, once finalized, will allow random testing.

A first time offender would face a 10-day suspension. It will be interesting to see how MLB enforces its new rules. Should a player like Bonds test positive would they suspend him?
I believe the answer to that question is an emphatic no.

Furthermore, it’s my opinion that the tough talk against steroids on the part of the powers that be running baseball is just window dressing, meant to appease its harshest critics, Senator John McCain and President Bush, former owner of the Texas Rangers.

Quite frankly, I think very few people involved in baseball today care whether or not its players use steroids.

After the missing World Series of 1994, the NFL usurped MLB’s place as America’s premier sports league.

In the current sports climate, baseball has been relegated to doing battle with the NBA as the number three sporting league in terms of television interest, as NASCAR now owns the second spot.

Selig is almost desperate to attract attention to the game of baseball. With the notable exception of the Red Sox World Series victory last fall, home runs seem to be the only way baseball captures the imagination of the sporting public.

In 1998, there was the epic home run duel between Mark McGwire of the St. Louis Cardinals (now retired), and Sammy Sosa, then with the Chicago Cubs. McGwire ended up obliterating the old home run mark of 61, with 70 of his own.

That record stood for all of three years, when Bonds, at age 37, belted 73. Before 2001, his greatest home run output in a single season was 49. The steroid rumors began following Bonds immediately, and even the innuendo tarnished the record, if not the game itself. Now it’s more than just innuendo.

But MLB does not care. Look at their advertisements some time. They play up the home run hitters, with their muscles that look like they belong in the pages of a Marvel comic book, as the face of the game.

In a time where baseball is struggling to regain its place at the top of the American sports scene, it’ll do just about anything. If steroid fueled, home run hitting freaks are what it takes, so be it.