Congress can't go after baseball for abuse of human growth hormone without tackling football first, and Washington isn't about to take on the nation's most popular game.

01:00 AM EDT on Sunday, June 11, 2006

BY RICH HOFMANN
The Philadelphia Daily News

WASHINGTON -- It was 4 o'clock, and Phillies manager Charlie Manuel took a seat on the dugout bench and reporters surrounded him to chat about the stuff that managers and reporters chat about before games, about who's playing well and who's struggling and the other whatnot of their business. It is a daily ritual, timeless, forever.

At the other end of the dugout, catcher Sal Fasano was talking, almost whispering. The subject was Jason Grimsley and the latest baseball drug allegations, this one about human growth hormone. And Fasano said, "I'm not sure, but I think the fans are becoming desensitized to it all."

It is the point you can never escape if you think about this whole business for any amount of time at all: that while this is all very interesting, and while cheating is all very wrong (and, in this case, maybe even illegal), nobody cares.

All public interest in this is prurient, and fleeting. Meanwhile, the paying customers keep paying. Major league attendance compared to this point last season is virtually identical. If anybody is staying away from the park because of the dastardly cheaters, it isn't obvious. And nobody is e-mailing the local sports columnist with suggestions that this subject be pursued with greater vigor.

Barry Bonds has been ruined, true enough. But he is in a separate category, alone among active major leaguers, isolated by his personality, his place in history, and his leaked grand-jury testimony. The popularity of the game as a whole appears to be unaffected.

"Personally, I don't know anybody who has stayed away (because of steroid/HGH allegations)," Fasano said. "More people still stay away because of the strike than any other reason, I think."

And that was in 1994. Fasano is right and the reason is obvious enough. The strike directly affected the fans. The strike took their game away from them, their World Series. It also disabused them of any warm-and-fuzzy notions that might have survived the free-agent era. As a result, the fans' expectations are different than a generation ago. This isn't about love, not in the way it used to be. The demand now is for entertainment, nothing more.

These drug allegations, when they don't affect megapersonalities or cherished records, are just like the ubiquitous television crawl: read, shrug, when's the Yankees-Red Sox score going to come around?

"We know the substances are being used, and we know baseball is doing what it can to clean it up," Fasano said. "But do fans want to hear about it all the time? I don't know."

Despite the early hysterics, Grimsley is not going to bring baseball down. Congress might stir up some outrage -- there are elections in five months, remember -- but it will be a blip. Who are they going to get to testify? Not Grimsley, who is in the midst of a legal investigation. Not anybody who would draw an audience, which is what this has always been about. And besides, until there are reliable tests for HGH performed in laboratories located in the United States, this is going nowhere.

Remember when NFL commissioner Paul Tagliabue testified before Congress? Remember when he said, "If we've got to start outsourcing or offshoring our drug programs, then I think we're in trouble." The line was as disingenuous -- as if Switzerland is some kind of a rogue state -- as it was effective. This thing is going nowhere until an American lab can do the blood tests, and until there is greater unanimity within the drug-testing community that the HGH tests really work.

But there is another reason, a bigger reason: Congress can't bring down baseball over the matter of HGH without bringing down football first.

And Congress is not bringing down football.

Is not.

Just remember back to the time when the honorables -- with the complicity/encouragement of baseball commissioner Bud Selig -- pressured baseball and its union to change its collectively bargained drug policy not once, but twice. Baseball's policy is now significantly tougher than football's, yet the NFL was not required to stiffen its collectively bargained penalties. And throughout the hearings, Selig was (deservedly) beaten about the head and neck with blunt instruments while Tagliabue was treated to fist-bumps and hosannas.

They are not going to go after the NFL. They are not going to ask the NFL -- which turned weight training into a science decades before the first baseball player picked up anything heavier than a pint -- why it has not led the way on HGH despite the ballooning of the sport's collective waistline in the last 15 years.

Congress is not going after the most popular sport in the country. And it cannot get away with stomping on baseball about not having blood testing for HGH without stomping on football, too.

So, we are years away from testing for HGH -- at which point the professional cheaters will be on to the next thing, anyway. And, so, while the temptation here is to tell you, "Never mind," it seems that has been your position all along.