01:46 AM EST on Friday, March 18, 2005

This is the price tag.

The price tag for the summer of '98, when the home-run chase between Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa brought baseball fever back, the summer when balls went flying over fences, fans kept going through the turnstiles, and interest in the game seemed as high as a McGwire home run disappearing into the summer night. It's the price tag for the home-run explosion in the past decade, one that's seen the game's popularity grow like the escalating salaries of the players.

This is the price tag, this three-ring circus conducted in Washington yesterday, the day baseball got dragged through the mud, its steroid scandal run up the flagpole for all the world to see.

McGwire and Sosa?

Yesterday they were two players testifying before a congressional panel investigating drugs in baseball, both of them backpedaling as if an inside fastball was coming at their heads.

It all seemed a long way from that glorious summer of '98.

But this is now Major League Baseball paying for its failure to act, and at first glance it seems almost unbelievable that it has come to this. Yesterday was a graphic reminder of how inept the people who run this game have been, how incompetent they've been in dealing with this issue, how they have betrayed their role as caretakers of the game.

There were six current and former players testifying, three of whom are among the top 10 all-time home-run hitters. Then there was Jose Canseco, the former star who now has become the poster child for steroid abuse, baseball's smoking gun. More important, there was this grand old game in one of its darkest moments, its biggest scandal since the "Black Sox" betting scandal in 1919.

This is the price tag for letting the steroid problem fester like some untreated boil for much too long.

No matter that, over the past decade or so, too many players seemed to be drastically changing their body size in their 30s. No matter that too many players seemed as bulked up as football linemen, body types far different from baseball players of just two decades ago. No matter that all visible evidence seemed to point to the obvious conclusion that something was going on.

Nothing ever got done.

Why?

For the simple reason that it was in no one's best interest to deal with it. Not the owners who saw baseballs flying out of parks, which created more interest in the game. No small thing in a sport that had been supplanted by the National Football League as America's national pastime, a game being criticized for being too slow and too boring, the ultimate negatives in a new Internet world.

Certainly not the players whose big numbers translated into more money, more celebrity. Remember the old baseball adage that home-run hitters drive Cadillacs? That's never been more true. We are a sports society in love with the long ball, in love with big numbers.

IS IT REALLY so surprising that too many players seemed to opt for the quick fix, instant muscles in an instant culture? Is it really so surprising that in a society where drugs are as omnipresent as television, too many athletes would take them, especially when the rewards were so high?

You would like to think that the fans would have expressed more outrage, especially since the specter of steroids now clouds the game's sacred records. But that never happened either.

No matter that the Cansecos of the world came to resemble cartoon figures, with their Popeye forearms and their sculpted bodies. No matter that you didn't need some medical degree to see that some players who once were thin now looked like they were ready for pro wrestling.

Wasn't that all part of the appeal?

Didn't that make them even more larger than life, the kind of figures we want our heroes to be?

In retrospect, we were all enablers in this sleazy little scenario. The owners. The union. The fans. All of us. In a sense, we all contributed to this attack on baseball's integrity, this attack that should have been dealt with a long time ago, back when all the signs were there.

Instead, we all just ignored it.

Until Jason Giambi told a grand jury he used steroids, and Canseco wrote a steroids version of a kiss-and-tell book and became baseball's worst nightmare.

Until steroids became the story of this spring training, the story that now taints everyone who has put up big home-run numbers in the past decade or so, even the ones who are innocent.

Until yesterday, when baseball got dragged through the mud before a congressional panel, its steroid scandal run up the flagpole for all the world to see.

The price tag.