01:00 AM EDT on Friday, June 9, 2006

BY JIM LITKE
Associated Press

Picking baseball's All-Performance-Enhancing team just got a whole lot easier. Because now, just about everybody who dropped in or out of the game in the last decade is in play.

Up until the feds threw a net around former Diamondbacks pitcher Jason Grimsley and dumped some of the evidence on the deck, it was easy to focus on the deep end of the talent pool -- where high-profile, broken-down sluggers collected like lint around a filter.

So we knew, for instance, that Barry Bonds, Sammy Sosa and Jose Canseco had locked up the outfield spots. That Mark McGwire, Rafael Palmeiro and Jason Giambi would rotate between first base and DH. And that the late Ken Caminiti would have gotten the nod at third.

With that many juiced bats in the lineup, you could have dipped into the low minors, pulled a pitcher at random off the drug-suspension list, and still beat just about anybody.

Now, take your pick of pitchers, middle infielders -- any player at any position, really. What Grimsley reminded us is that everybody, pitchers as well as hitters, small fish and big ones alike, is worthy of suspicion.

In a 15-year career, he played for seven different teams and a handful of organizations. That's a lot of teammates. He wasn't trying to win the Cy Young, just hang on. So were nearly all of his teammates. He was willing to take steroids, amphetamines and human growth hormone to do it, clinging to HGH even after a drug test was in place because he knew baseball wouldn't catch him.

How many of his teammates were willing to do the same?

Pick a number.

When former MVPs Canseco and Caminiti said half of the players in the major leagues or more were juiced, everybody from commissioner Bud Selig to union chief Don Fehr to self-appointed-guardian-of-the-game Curt Schilling said: "Consider the source."

When Congress took them up on it, Sosa was struck mute and McGwire's memory locked up. But Palmeiro had the chutzpah to poke a finger in the lawmakers' faces and emphasize the word "never."

A few months later, after testing positive for stanozolol -- a powerful steroid with a long history of abuse -- he amended the phrase to "never knowingly."

Right.

So far, most of the buzz emanating from the Grimsley story has been about naming names: who he ratted out; whether he should have given anyone up; and which players the feds already were trailing. All those will come out soon enough.

But less important than who used performance-enhancers is how many, because it's the only way to begin gauging how much of the offensive barrage we just witnessed was simply better hitting through chemistry. Individual players have been cheating since baseball began.

But Grimsley's case suggests not only that doping is still widespread; but that the number of players who took part in baseball's "Supersized Era" might actually be close to the one Canseco and Caminiti seemingly pulled out of thin air.

Bonds and the rest of the inflatable sluggers so dominated the screen that nobody thought to look at the players in the background. We should have known better. Last August, a day after Palmeiro got busted to great fanfare, baseball announced that Ryan Franklin, a 32-year-old right-hander who relied more on savvy and changing speeds than power, had tested positive.

Like Grimsley, Franklin was a journeyman just trying to keep a roster spot job. He was the eighth player nailed last year, but he completed a trophy set. MLB already had busted hard-throwing pitchers, infielders, outfielders, Latins, blacks and whites, nobodies and used-to-be-first-ballot Hall of Famers.

Franklin, though, was the first soft-tosser to make the list, someone whose performance -- even juiced -- didn't seem enhanced enough to warrant suspicion.

So it was for most of Grimsley's career, but here are the most revealing moments from a timeline Sports Illustrated put together: In 1998, Grimsley was 31, stuck in Buffalo playing Class AAA ball, and had made a total of $1 million playing the game. Two years later, according to court documents, Grimsley used steroids to recover from shoulder surgery, and never stopped reaching into the medicine chest for pick-me-ups again. He went on to earn $9 million in the big leagues.

"He wasn't a star," the magazine noted, "but Grimsley was good enough to get regular work for the first time in his life."