Missed It By That Much

ESPN's Howard Bryant nearly gets it right:

Angry denials on the part of Major League Baseball and the MLB Players Association, which had condoned a decade-long drug culture, marked the hearing on March 17, 2005. These gave way to a very different mood Tuedsay. Selig and Fehr looked beaten, weary of the subterfuge.

This time, there were no subpoenas or confrontations, no threats that Congress ultimately would oversee baseball's drug-testing program or torpedo its anti-trust exemption. There was simply the public acknowledgement by the two most influential men in the sport that their game had gone awry with them at the controls. It was an obvious, but powerful and unprecedented, moment. Anyone looking for fireworks would have been disappointed. In the larger scope, Congress received its victory by forcing Selig to abandon his former positions and by taking the teeth out of Fehr's usually sharp rhetoric. That left Selig and Fehr where Congress has long wanted them: accepting responsibility for their considerable roles in allowing performance-enhancing drugs to define the 13 years that followed the 1994 players strike.

When Rep. Mark Souder, R-Ind., asked if they felt they had been complicit in the steroids era, Selig and Fehr answered softly in the affirmative, and this game of running from the truth was at last over.

So close! And yet, so far...

Selig and Fehr may have stopped running from the truth. But that leaves two complicit parties to the Steroid Era who have yet to admit their part in the shameful proceedings.

One is our baseball media. The other is us, the fans. Real-time reporting shows that both groups thought Lenny Dykstra and Ken Caminiti and Big Mac and Sammy and the rest of that crew were just ducky back in the day. Let's stop "running" from that truth, 'fess up, and get on with the game we love.