01:00 AM EDT on Friday, June 23, 2006

BY ART MARTONE
Journal Sports Editor

Former President Harry Truman had a saying: "The only thing new in the world is the history you don't know."

Think about that when you consider this quote:

"Baseball players will take anything. If you had a pill that would guarantee a pitcher 20 wins but might take five years off his life, he'd take it."

That quote seems especially noteworthy in light of the latest revelations in baseball's exploding scandal regarding performance-enhancing drugs, doesn't it? Jason Grimsley, Paxton Crawford. Marginal major-leaguers -- or, in Crawford's case, blink-of-an-eye major-leaguers -- caught with (or admitting to having) their hands in the vial.

Just when we thought we'd gotten our arms around all this, and had grudgingly accepted the notion that superstars would look for that little something extra to push them beyond greatness into immortality, we're slapped in the face with a new reality. That it went beyond a Barry Bonds or a Rafael Palmeiro looking to artificially chisel their name into the record book. That the claims of players such as Jose Canseco and the late Ken Caminiti about widespread drug use in baseball, so ridiculed when they made them, had some validity. And that it reached down to the furthest recesses of major-league -- and minor-league -- rosters.

That quote seems to make sense of it all, doesn't it?

Now consider:

That quote is from Jim Bouton. He wrote it on March 11, 1969. It was printed the next year in his groundbreaking book, Ball Four -- 36 baseball seasons ago.

Suddenly you realize the scope of what's unfolding before us. And that we're all missing the point.

It's not about steroids and human growth hormones. These are simply the drugs that are around today. Nor it is about the inherent dishonesty of the modern athlete. Had steroids, et al., been around in 1969, Bouton and some of his contemporaries would have taken them.

(Don't believe me? Go back to that March 11, 1969 entry in Ball Four and read how Bouton once used butazolidin, which is normally given to horses. And a drug called DMSO, the distribution of which was stopped during Bouton's playing days because it was feared it caused blindness. Or read Jerry Izenberg's book No Medals For Trying, in which he quotes the New York Giants trainer as saying the Giants knew quarterback Phil Simms and linebacker Lawrence Taylor took DMSO in 1989, even though the team forbade it, and how the players acquired it from the Meadowlands race track next to Giants Stadium.)

What's happening is not a problem that emerged in the 1990s and 2000s. It's the maturity of a culture in athletics -- not just baseball but many sports, amateur as well as professional -- that eventually led to modern-day steroids use.

That culture? That the quest to succeed justifies virtually anything. Or, as is said more crudely in clubhouses: If you ain't cheatin', you ain't tryin'.

It takes shape in many different ways. In their book Game of Shadows, authors Mark Fainaru-Wada and Lance Williams claim Bonds turned to steroids out of intense jealousy of the adulation received by Mark McGwire when McGwire broke baseball's single-season home-run record. Crawford, in his current interview in ESPN The Magazine, says he started using steroids to recover faster from arm pain.

But perhaps the most telling story comes from A.J. Hinch, a contemporary knockabout catcher who played for the A's, Royals, Tigers and Phillies from 1998-2004. In Howard Bryant's book Juiced, Hinch tells about coming to the realization that using steroids might mean the difference between a major- and minor-league career. The difference between earning several hundred-thousand dollars a season on a big-league roster -- and, if he lasted four years in the bigs, qualifying for a pension that would secure his family's financial status for life -- or scraping by on a Triple-A paycheck until the day he was cut loose.

Hinch, a Stanford graduate, wrestled with the dilemma. He even talked about it with his wife. In the end, he says he decided to stay clean. He wound up playing 441 big-league games spread over seven seasons and had a career .219 batting average.

The decision he faced was the decision faced by every baseball player -- and probably every pro athlete -- when steroid use became commonplace. And it was driven not necessarily by a desire for greatness or a lust for breaking rules, but, at its root, by a basic professional survival instinct.

In that light, drug use by players such as Grimsley and Crawford suddenly becomes understandable, if not acceptable. (Not to mention helium-bat Manny Alexander, an offensively challenged utility infielder with the Red Sox in 2000 whose car was found to have steroids in the glove compartment.) And it offers a plausible explaination as to why players in Bouton's day would have gladly taken that 20-wins-for-five-years pill.

Which is not to say that every player succumbs to the temptation or even wants to use performance-enhancing drugs. Or that they should have. But understand that the pressures that led to this scandal are not new. That players were wrestling with these temptations long before any of us had ever heard of such things as HGH. And that the use of these drugs -- and in more sports than baseball -- was/is probably more widespread than any of us could have imagined.

Many more bombshells will explode in the weeks and months ahead -- though none will probably match Paxton Crawford on the implausibility scale -- and when it's over, we'll shake our heads and wonder how our heads could have been buried so far into the sand for so many years.

And when I do, I'll think of Harry Truman, Ball Four, and a March 11, 1969 quote that should have stopped us from laughing quite so hard at Jose Canseco and Ken Caminiti.

amartone@projo.com / (401) 277-7345