At the risk of sounding like a condescending scold — in other words, becoming like those I like to scold — I offer up a post from January written on the heels of media excuse-making about Baseball Hall of Fame voting (and in one case, the willful abstinence from casting a ballot).

The reason was the presence of suspected steroids users Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens, among others, on the ballot. I’ll insert the second paragraph from that post at the end of the second paragraph of this post, since it’s particularly noteworthy given the news this week about major steroids-related suspensions about to come down in Major League Baseball. I wrote then:

This absolutism has at times been a disservice to the game, because it tends to whitewash or distort history. While historical interpretation is a largely subjective endeavor, the burden of placing the accomplishments of its greatest players in a proper, fair and accurate historical context has become an increasingly troublesome one.

The report at ESPN.com that MLB investigators were coming down especially harshly on reputed steroids distributor Tony Bosch — mainly by threatening him with crippling legal action — hasn’t generated much in the way of a full-throated endorsement of what would be severe suspensions to Ryan Braun, Alex Rodriguez and nearly two dozen other players.

The reported punishments are just that for now, not yet announced by MLB. Yet baseball’s pursuit in this case is already under close scrutiny in some media circles. Coming down the hardest is Patrick Hruby of Sports on Earth, who makes the usual connections to the War on Drugs, and how sports entities, despite stricter and stricter testing, can’t really make a dent unless they get the assistance of, or use methods approaching those in the law enforcement community.

He extensively quotes Penn State professor Charles Yesalis, a noted sports doping expert and author of “The Steroids Game,” published in 1998, about the time anti-doping institutions were being created. Fifteen years later, he says that while athletes aren’t particularly skilled at “evading aggressive law enforcement,” testing may never be fully effective:

“What would work? Aggressive, undercover police sting operations. I’m talking handcuffs. Put it on ‘Cops.’ But are you willing to do that against Penn State, USC, the Baltimore Ravens, the Los Angeles Lakers, on a sustained basis?”

This is especially alarming to think about given how MLB is considered to have the toughest anti-steroids provisions of any professional sports league in North America.

The Biogenesis case could very well be a tipping point in escalating police-style investigation of suspected steroids users. But Yesalis thinks overly aggressive probes stand to backfire with a sports-loving public that hasn’t shown the same zeal to get rid of “cheaters” as sports league and agencies thirsting after good public relations.

The demonizing of steroids that the scolds think is coming from rank-and-file sports lovers is rather the handiwork of zealots, especially in the media, who can’t bear to have the “purity” of the games as they have known them tainted in any way.

Yesalis concludes that the onus really is on the fans, and that may be the biggest problem of all:

“Look, the best way to deal with [drugs in sports] is for all fans to boycott. It would be cleaned up almost instantaneously. But nobody gives a damn. In fact, these drugs make the product better for viewing and enjoyment. Do you want to watch a beauty contest where everyone is overweight and wearing no makeup?”

So where are some of these scolds now? Eerily quiet, or approaching the subject from a different perspective. Howard Bryant of ESPN.com, author of “Juicing the Game” and who sent in a blank Hall of Fame ballot, opted to pursue the labor angle, saying long-term suspensions would upset a hard-won peace stemming from the 1994 strike.

Surprisingly, Bryant is rather even-handed here, something I didn’t think possible on the subject:

The real issue is baseball’s attempt to suspend players for their association with a wellness clinic, without actual positive-test violations of the league’s drug policy. Melky Cabrera the one player linked to Biogenesis who has tested positive, already served his 50-game suspension. Unless documentation shows –assuming Bosch’s documentation is better, say, than Brian McNamee’s decade-old syringes and gauze in a Coke can — that Cabrera was still using PEDs after his suspension last season, it seems inconceivable that baseball would be able to suspend him again for essentially discovering the source of the original offense.

As I said, it’s all tied to serious labor strife Bryant predicts would surface if MLB wields a heavy hammer. It’s good to see at least a tiny bit of tacit acknowledgement that accused dopers do indeed have rights, a benefit of the doubt he wouldn’t confer upon them for Hall of Fame purposes. Bryant goes on:

The public is fatigued by the steroid era, and there was an expectation that players, especially star players such as Braun and Rodriguez, would act more responsibly.

But it seems the better option, or at least an accompanying one, would be to encourage player cooperation to glean information about how the Biogenesis 20 beat their tests (if they were in fact tested at all during the proper time frames).

Tom Verducci of Sports Illustrated, another A List doping scold, calls Bosch’s cooperation “a major breakthrough” for MLB, but otherwise is strangely muted.

Then there’s Bob Ford of The Philadelphia Inquirer, who uses the “cheating” word (and hails from a household with another sportswriter doping scold of the Lance Armstrong variety) as he offers up pure milquetoast:

Baseball has been the most successful – or perhaps the most willing – in the fight against performance-enhancing drugs. Maybe that is the result of the bad burn suffered by the sport when it giddily accepted the popularity boost during the record-destroying Steroid Era.

How has the sport been “burned?” Ford doesn’t elaborate. When it comes to the scolds making such declarations, you’re expected to take them at their word.

Even if their words appear to be falling on more and more deaf ears.

The Schoolmarm might be the oblivious of all, not even bothering to examine the process of the MLB investigation of Biogenesis, much less the sordid prospect of baseball climbing into bed with the likes of Bosch. Why? Because of the children:

Parents with teenagers in sports, boys and girls who studies show are already trying PEDs to play better, should be thankful that their kids will see the news of more athletes being disgraced by doping.

The next day she visited the subject again, citing how the public turned against Lance Armstrong “almost overnight after he admitted to using PEDs in January.” But it’s more likely the public was disturbed by shameful stories of his treatment of associates, team members and others in his circle who finally outed him as a jerk above all. Bosch is mentioned only in passing, since the worst offenders here are the “cheaters” — whether they’ve been found guilty of doping or not.

In linking to Tim Marchman’s scorching evisceration of the Biogenesis probe on Deadspin, Joshua Benton of the Nieman Journalism Lab may have had the most prescient comment on this when he Tweeted on Thursday:

Is there any topic in which the trad media/new media divide is stronger than PEDs?

Fascinating read from Jeff Passan about how new MLB free agency rules designed to prevent Scott Boras from dominating the hot stove season have had a major impact well before the month began:

The new draft format included fixed bonus pools for teams based on the previous year’s record; the worst teams would get the most money. A separate rule transformed compensation for free agents who left. Teams would have to offer a player a one-year deal worth the average of the highest-paid 125 players in the major leagues the previous season – about $13.3 million this year. If another team chose to sign one of those players, it would forfeit its first-round draft choice and the bonus-pool money that came with it – unless it was a top 10 pick, in which case it would lose its second-rounder and the accompanying bonus value.

The resulting concoction was poisonous to the nine players offered the one-year tender. David Ortiz and Hiroki Kuroda re-signed with the Red Sox and Yankees. Josh Hamilton and B.J. Upton, the jewels of the class, went to the Angels and Braves, who forfeited the Nos. 22 and 28 picks, respectively. Nick Swisher’s market collapsed before he found a four-year, $56 million deal from Cleveland, which didn’t lose its first-round pick because it’s No. 5 overall.

In the old draft system, even when teams lost their first-round picks for free agents, they could overspend in later rounds to pluck players who slipped because of signability concerns. The pool system limits flexibility and creativity, leaving teams even more reticent to plunge into an already-inflated free-agent market when it’s tied to the draft.

Keep in mind that these new rules are in accordance with the players union, which gets six additional players a year eligible for early arbitration:

Boras’ involvement in three-quarters of the cases also may be a factor in the league’s slow response. Teams have handed out more than $750 million to Boras clients in January alone, from Barry Bonds in 2002 to Carlos Beltran in 2005 to J.D. Drew in 2007. In 2010 he got Matt Holliday $120 million, in 2011 Adrian Beltre $90 million and in 2012 Prince Fielder $214 million.

While it’s tough to argue Bourn, Lohse and Soriano are in any of those players’ classes, the distinct lack of interest – especially from the teams with pick Nos. 11-20 – makes his job that much harder. Should Boras extract multiyear contracts with new teams for any of them, it would be among his greatest victories as an agent.

Sportswriters don’t like to be told what to do — especially from editors. They especially hate to be told what to wear.

So it’s not surprising there would be some pushback from last week’s Major League Baseball announcement that all credentialed journalists would need to follow the guidelines of a dress code, the first created by any professional sports league or entity:

“Members of the media will be prohibited from wearing flip-flops, short skirts, tank tops or anything with a team logo.”

The guidelines raised hackles not for the humiliating reminder that shower shoes are not the ideal footwear in a press box, nor for any attire bearing a team logo.

Instead, they’ve got some members of the tribe rather indignant because of another item of clothing mentioned in the above sentence.

The short skirts.

You know, worn only by women.

At espnW, Jane McManus sounded off first, insisting that the policy is all about women. She refers to this portion of the Associated Press story:

“The skimpy attire worn by some of the TV reporters covering the Marlins in Miami drew particular scrutiny.”

The skirts, according to the policy, shouldn’t be more than 3-4 inches above the knee.

McManus wrote that some media outlets hire women “based on sex appeal,” and this is an important point. But then she swings and misses:

“The policy is unenforceable, and the people who will be affected by it are the ones who actually care enough to dress professionally in the first place.”

Well, if they’re dressed professionally, they shouldn’t have a problem, right?

Her complaints were mild compared to a couple of men taking up the women’s cause. At The Big Lead, the usually-good Ty Duffy proclaimed this to be about “patriarchal control.” And then he just got simply absurd:

“Will Bud Selig post grizzly nuns with Coke cans at media entrances to enforce this?”

The loudest bloviating came from Charles Pierce at Grantland, a favorite of mine but here just in a blinding rage:

“Are they going to do what the nuns used to do and make female reporters kneel down and measure the distance between the hemline and the floor with a ruler? Are we all now supposed to ‘make room for the Holy Ghost’ when we sit together at dinner?”

I understand this is hyperbole, but what’s with the nun references? Please enlighten the lapsed Protestant in me.

Better yet, why are three usually solid writers jumping the tracks on the conspiracy bandwagon? The policy very clearly stated a set of gender-neutral guidelines that were crafted with the assistance of the Baseball Writers Association of America.

A member of the guidelines committee, in fact, is a woman, Susan Slusser, who’s also the first female president of that organization. She explained that there actually was a credentialed journalist wearing flip flops at the World Series and that the guidelines were all about common sense:

“Don’t dress like a hobo and don’t dress like a ho, those are the extremes they’re looking at.”

She was joking a little, but there’s not been much good humor about what women wear in press boxes or to practices since TV Azteca’s Ines Sainz turned the New York Jets 2010 preseason camp into a circus with her girl-at-the-bar presence.

She didn’t deserve the treatment she got, but as I wrote at the time, women cannot pretend that they can dress however they like, and go wherever they like, and not expect unwanted attention.

I wasn’t alone among women in making this point. But the reaction to the MLB guidelines are a sad reminder that some don’t want to believe that professionalism cuts both ways. If you want to be regarded as a pro, then present yourself like one.

Male or female.

Of all the speculation over National League MVP Ryan Braun’s positive test for a banned substance — and which was disclosed anonymously to ESPN.com — only a handful of writers are raising the most important points. Maury Brown:

“If he lucks out and it’s found that due to some circumstance he should not be suspended, then the larger question is, how did the positive get leaked to ESPN? That’s a larger concern in the overall. If Braun does win on appeal, he will forever be guilty in the court of public opinion.”

And Jonah Keri:

“We don’t know if so-called performance-enhancing drugs actually enhance the performance of baseball players. And if they do, how, and by how much.

There’s a widespread belief among many baseball followers that PEDs bring gigantic benefits to those who take them. The most rigorous way to prove a theory is to conduct a proper double-blind randomized clinical trial. Give PEDs to 500 players, withhold them from 500 others, then track the results. That way you know who used and who didn’t use, and you strip out any possible placebo effect, where a player might gain confidence and possibly play better just by thinking that PEDs will help his performance.”

Those who claim that players using steroids must mean those substances work assume some kind of medical knowledge on the players’ part, because of an unproven belief that they actually enhance performance. Those who see the offensive boom of the early-’90s to mid-aughts as the product of PED use ignore a multitude of factors ranging from a diluted pool of pitchers caused by expansion to smaller ballparks to strike zones the size of postage stamps.”

Thank you gentlemen.

While this case is important on so many other fronts, most everything else is the noise of another maudlin morality play about “epic cheaters” or why Barry Bonds didn’t get the same level of public support. Or whether Braun should be stripped of his MVP award if he does end up serving a 50-game suspension. Or his declining fantasy value. Or his damaged “brand.”

Please. To some Braun will always be tainted, as Brown suggested, even if he wins his appeal against very long odds. WNBA star Diana Taurasi still is, even after she was vindicated due to a sloppy Turkish doping lab.

A high-profile star player in America’s “national pastime” who is only accused of violating MLB’s steroids policy — and we know this only because of an improper release of information to a powerful news organization — is having his motives questioned before his guilt or innocence is known. So much for the benefit of the doubt.

Jeff Passan isn’t incorrect that football’s dominance in Florida has badly damaged home attendance for the Tampa Bay Rays.

But their hideous home field environment does them no good either, especially since most of their games are played before the gridiron gears up:

“The Rays walked into an ambush. The idea of having a Major League Baseball team in Tampa-St. Pete was attractive. The reality was very different: Football is so prevalent, so overwhelmingly popular, that they never had a chance to succeed.”

That  a team with one World Series title already to its name and could own the best record in baseball this year is set to give away more than 20,000 tickets for tonight’s game speaks to something deeper than all this.