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?

I’ve never been all that conflicted about doping in sports.

This probably makes me an amoral, if not evil, American to some.

As I have watched Tour de France cyclists pedal high into the Alps over the years, I have thought to myself more than once: “If they’re not taking something, they’re crazy.”

Before there were anabolic steroids, riders downed all kinds of substances to gain a competitive boost, if not an advantage. Including strychnine.

But later this week, these historical realities will be drowned out by a new round of outrage that one of America’s greatest sporting heroes was a “cheater.”

As I write this, Lance Armstrong is taping his interview with Oprah Winfrey, supposedly confessing to doping months after America’s taxpayer-funded anti-doping agency dropped its load of documents, and as has he continued years of denials. Until now.

While the interview with the queen of America’s confessional culture won’t air until Thursday, there’s already plenty of media pontification that figures to go over the top later in the week.

Former Armstrong defender Buzz Bissinger “came clean” in his Monday column in The Daily Beast, alleging he was duped.

I also anticipate the interview will include plenty of “contrived contrition” — the speculation is Armstrong is doing this to earn U.S. Anti-Doping Agency reinstatement to compete in sanctioned Ironman competitions — but I’m not buying that Bissinger or anyone who feels betrayed by him was “played.”

As I have been blogging here for some time, so many cycling fans, Americans and yes, media representatives, have chosen to look the other way, failed to understand the history of the sport or exist in a state of denial about what’s been known in the cycling community for decades.

Bissinger, Rick Reilly and others played themselves, easily taken by a great American storyline: Ambitious young athlete battles cancer, wins seven Tour de France titles in a sport dominated by Europeans, serves as an inspiration to other cancer patients and young athletes, etc., etc.

The purity of this storyline, we now fret, was just too good to be true. That Armstrong is alleged to have bullied, threatened and intimidated others makes this fresh reality even uglier. It’s easy to complain about being lied to now.

But it is precisely because of our Puritanical culture — where the redemptive forum furnished by Oprah Winfrey culminates the spectacle of a desperate, fallen celebrity begging for another chance, if not forgiveness — that we have arrived at this point.

When Congress criminalized anabolic steroids in the wake of the Ben Johnson revelations and opened another wasteful front on the War on Drugs, demonizing the use of these substances became particularly necessary for those pushing for “clean” sports. But as I noted regarding the Baseball Hall of Fame voting last week, some of the giant figures of the game’s Golden Age were less-than-secret pill-poppers, a fact conveniently ignored by absolutists who couldn’t summon a vote for Barry Bonds, Roger Clemens and others.

This stance of zero tolerance has increased over the past 20 or so years, as the Lords of Baseball have been shamed into enforcing anti-doping measures. Last week’s announcement about HGH testing came of their own accord. Whether this is a PR move or something more substantive is a topic for another post, as is the depth of the fever pitch over Armstrong’s doping.

The latter says something about our society beyond feeling “duped” by Armstrong. I suspect it’s our inability, or unwillingness, to have a healthy, adult conversation about steroids that isn’t as black-and-white as the anti-doping zealots, and their true believers in the press, want us to believe.

Now Armstrong is going to be the perpetual butt of jokes, and blamed for bringing down a sport he once helped give unprecedented stature. I don’t mean to be flip about any of this; he’s in a hell of a lot of serious legal and financial trouble (Dave Zirin rounds this up very well) from which he may never fully recover. It would be too easy to say that if we didn’t make steroids use to be such a reprehensible crime (which it isn’t even in its strict legal sense now) none of this would have happened. There would have been nothing to lie, or bully others, about.

But as long as influential journalists remain fully taken by tales of ethically pure athletes, driven only by the love of competition, the desire to extinguish the culture of “dirty” athletes and their dastardly deeds will never be quenched.

The most insufferable, self-righteous examplar of this, Irish journalist David Walsh, is milking Armstrong’s comedown especially hard. He’s been the media’s Elliott Ness figure all along, and gives himself much of the credit for what’s come to pass. Walsh (more on him tomorrow) and his editors couldn’t resist reprinting one of his triumphal it’s really all about me columns over the weekend, as he positions himself to profit — literally — from the media schadenfreude over Lance Armstrong that isn’t going away anytime soon.

The burden of history falls upon baseball like perhaps no other sport in North America. The idealism, desire for moral purity and poetic meanderings of some of the game’s most zealous gatekeepers (most of them self-identified, rather than actual) has hardly diminished after more than a century.

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.

This was the dilemma faced by many writers given Baseball Hall of Fame ballots last year. The results were announced yesterday, and for the first time since 1996, the members of the Baseball Writers Association of America who voted approved no living players for induction.

The lengthy list of names on the ballot made it difficult enough for any player to reach the threshold of being voted on 75 percent of the ballots cast. That some of those names have been associated with steroids use has ushered in what is considered a “new” era on the matter of reaching Cooperstown.

I would agree with that argument, up to a point. This was the first year of eligibility for Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens, the players most hounded by the federal government for doping allegations. We’re not many years removed from the absurdity of Jeff Novitzky, an anti-steroids IRS agent, sifting through a dumpster at the BALCO lab, and the millions of taxpayer dollars that were wasted to prosecute Bonds and trot Clemens before Congress to get them to confess to their “crimes.”

A number of writers have explained why for them even being connected to or suspected of steroids use crosses the line of “Rule 5,” the Hall of Fame voting provision that goes to a player’s character.

Howard Bryant of ESPN.com, as prominent a steroids scold as there is in the media and author of the 2005 book, “Juicing the Game,” wrote Wednesday that he sent in a blank ballot “because the damages to the game were real:”

I understand that we live in a pharmacological age. There is a pill for everything, whether it is Viagra, Lipitor or Adderall. I understand that we will never get clarity about who used and who didn’t or about how much drugs helped the numbers or hurt them. What will always baffle me, however, is that even in an age of intense cynicism, the lying and deceit don’t matter to some. Why are people who were offended by these years of dishonesty being cast now as outdated charlatans, soapbox preachers or the “moral police”? I wonder why there is so little outrage toward the liars and cheaters who for years used their clout with the fans, their enormous wealth, their fame and their influence in the game to deceive the public.

While I don’t doubt the sincerity of his feelings, the historical holes in his column are vast. First of all, anyone who routinely uses the word “cheaters” in this discussion tends to be an absolutist in expressing an intolerance for steroids. The same goes for “lying and deceit.” This verbiage is commonly employed by writers engaging in far too much schadenfreude regarding Lance Armstrong, for example.

After taking a beating from commenters on the column, Bryant poorly defended himself on Twitter Thursday with about the most arrogant thing I’ve ever seen from a sportswriter (and that’s saying a lot):

BBWAA is nothing but a mop.MLB, players sit back as HOF voters get pummeled for their mess. They punted Steroid Era to us+this is the price

Unlike those now turning their wrath against Armstrong and (alleged) baseball dopers after years of looking the other way, Bryant can’t be accused of being inconsistent about steroids. But he is terribly remiss in ignoring the fact that Cooperstown includes a rogues’ gallery of less-than-earnest human beings who cheated their way through life, if not necessarily on the diamond.

In Thursday’s SB Nation Longform feature, the father-son tandem of Michael and Colin MacDonald contend that absolutists waxing indignant now — and Bob Costas is singled out here — have no one but themselves to blame:

We do not think that steroid use is good or laudable. We wish the game were free from them. We wish steroids never had been used in baseball. But we also recognize reality. When the genie escaped the bottle, it forced players to choose between using and gaining a competitive advantage, and not using and suffering a competitive disadvantage. Using also endangers the player’s health and imposes the same choice on other players. Not using risks losing games and jobs (and the 1989 World Series). Some players will cheat at every opportunity and others will honor all rules no matter the temptation. But many players will play within the rules as the guardians of the game define and enforce them. But if the enforcement of the rules signals a “don’t ask, don’t tell” attitude, the blame originates with those sending the signal.

Prior to the publication of his 2009 book, “Cooperstown Confidential,” author Zev Chafets answered the absolutists as forthrightly as anyone ever has, pointing out the many unhealthy commodities consumed by players, Hall of Famers and otherwise, during the long history of the game:

Since the dawn of baseball, players have used whatever substances they believed would help them perform better, heal faster or relax during a long and stressful season. As far back as 1889, the pitcher Pud Galvin ingested monkey testosterone. During Prohibition, Grover Cleveland Alexander, also a pitcher, calmed his nerves with federally banned alcohol, and no less an expert than Bill Veeck, who owned several major-league teams, said that Alexander was a better pitcher drunk than sober.

In 1961, during his home run race with Roger Maris, Mickey Mantle developed a sudden abscess that kept him on the bench. It came from an infected needle used by Max Jacobson, a quack who injected Mantle with a home-brew containing steroids and speed. In his autobiography, Hank Aaron admitted once taking an amphetamine tablet during a game. The Pirates’ John Milner testified at a drug dealer’s trial that his teammate, Willie Mays, kept “red juice,” a liquid form of speed, in his locker. (Mays denied it.) After he retired, Sandy Koufax admitted the he was often “half high” on the mound from the drugs he took for his ailing left arm.

These arguments are gaining more traction in the mainstream media, including with some Hall of Fame voters, who are responding forcefully to the puritans. Another early chronicler of steroids in baseball, Sports Illustrated’s Tom Verducci, wrote this week why he won’t cross the same line as Bryant. So some voters who couldn’t check off Bonds or Clemens also excluded Craig Biggio, Jeff Bagwell and Mike Piazza by extension, which riled up Richard Justice of MLB.com:

Oh, Lord, scoop out my eyes with a plastic spoon. There are few things sportswriters enjoy more than preaching about right and wrong.

Ditto for baseball business writer Maury Brown, who doesn’t have a Hall of Fame vote but ought to:

People are not all “rainbows and unicorns.”…. Cheating in baseball began long before steroids were the lightening rod they are today… The HOF isn’t Church, so don’t vote like it is…. Those that are not filling out their ballots as a form of protest are weak, making the story about them, and need to get in the trenches, deal with it or step aside. Your vote is a privilege, not a right. Deal with the complexities of it all.

(Similarly smart views here from Derrick Goold of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Kevin Modesti of the Pasadena Star-News and Jayson Stark of ESPN.com.)

As the Hall of Fame votes were being finalized, documentary filmmaker Ken Burns anointed himself as Savonarola of Swat in rather churlish comments to the Hollywood Reporter that have ricocheted around the sports media world:

We know some pitchers extended their playing careers, we know some people hit the ball farther, but nobody hit .406, nobody had a 56-game hitting streak, no pitcher won 30 games, no pitcher won 35 games, no pitcher won 25 games. Maybe that helps you make it less onerous, but at the same time, those motherf—ers should suffer for a while.

Burns — who gave Costas, Bryant and Verducci unquestioned face time about steroids in his “Baseball” film — is among the last of the baseball Romantics, and it is a sad state of affairs. There’s a sense of desperation, if not moral outrage to their rhetoric, rife with the notion that the game’s robber barons of today aren’t owners who purloin public money for their playhouses but pumped-up sluggers who give fans the long ball they constantly crave.

But to denounce the absolutism of the Romantics is not to endorse the use of steroids, or to say that they are a good thing. It is to acknowledge the human flaws of many of those already in the Hall of Fame, and to understand the full historical range of so-called “cheating” behavior that predates the “steroid era” by decades. This is a nuanced topic that some wish to banish from discussion with a hardline sense of retroactive justice.

I wonder if Verducci missed this 1969 Sports Illustrated article about drug use in sports, with some prescient quotes at the top from Denny McLain.

The black-and-white persistence of the Romantics is fading away, but not because of any perceived moral relativism by a younger generation of writers or players who may shrug their shoulders at “juicing.” There is a heavy dose of realism and probity that is entering the discussion, a strong counter to those who wish to oversimplify.

What we are in now is the tail end of the Romantic era, for better or for worse. Some marginal candidates tied to steroids use may never get in, but with 14 years remaining on the ballot, Bonds and Clemens figure to gain induction. Their careers were well-established long before Major League Baseball began drawing a line against doping.

In blistering the zeal to sanitize the vote, Jeff Passan of Yahoo! Sports provides one of the few perspectives that puts the historical dereliction of duty by some Hall of Fame balloters in its rightful context:

This wasn’t just a referendum on steroids. It was one on the writers and their failure to recognize as long as they want the privilege of creating history, they must in doing so protect the worthy institution that finds them fit for the task. And considering the backlash following Wednesday’s revelation that it wasn’t just Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens who didn’t pass muster but Craig Biggio, Jeff Bagwell, Mike Piazza and so many others, the 10-year members of the Baseball Writers Association of America with Hall of Fame votes seem not to care about the damage they’re doing.

Andy Hutchins asks the essential question about the AP’s examination of PED use in college football:

“So the point of this ‘BOO THERE ARE STEROIDS IN SPORTS’ report is what?”

That is the point, and Tim Keown is happy to pile on:

“High school kids are getting and using steroids with the complicit approval of their parents and coaches. This isn’t news. Middle-aged rec-league cyclists are taking PEDs to improve their times and beat their buddies in weekend races. To think that a significant number of college athletes in a billion-dollar business with hopes of professional riches aren’t willing to get an illegal edge is ludicrous. Of course they are, especially when there’s little to no fear of getting caught.

“But college linemen don’t have hallowed records to break or a bizarrely sanctified hall of fame run by a chosen priesthood of voters. They’re just faceless guys wearing helmets and abusing their bodies for the entertainment of many and the profit of some.”

This is what the next phase of the post-Armstrong War on Steroids meme will sound like, and it will be repeated over and over and over.

In the name of the children.

Millard Baker raises even better points about cycling anti-doping crusader David Millar’s tut-tutting of the support for Armstrong from Alberto Contador and Miguel Indurain:

“There are likely cultural differences in the perception of doping. Perhaps steroids and PEDs are not stigmatized to the same degree in Spain. Perhaps doping does not have the same moral significance in Spain. But Millar’s arrogant defense of the superiority of the ‘Anglo-Saxon [puritanical] mentality’ certainly can’t be the best approach to doping in sports.”

Byliner reports that its most-read sports story of 2012 is Andrew Tilin’s “I couldn’t be more positive,” published in Outside magazine in May and recounting the year he spent taking T for a book project. Not surprisingly, Tilin felt the wrath of competitive cyclists whose existences are routinely scrutinized by the PED police:

“I’m not saying that what I did is smart or cool, or that my kids should someday be proud of me. But I discovered a few things, like how accessible performance-enhancing drugs really are. They’re so easy to acquire and safely use that I still wonder how many other graybeards dope.

“While I offer sincere apologies and would never again betray my fellow racers, cycling’s organizers, or its governing bodies, I’ll be honest: If you threw out the rules and put a doctor in front of me holding syringes? The temptation would be hard to resist.”

Mark Haller of the Arizona Republic claims he’s “choosing to speak loudly by using silence” in declining to fill out a Hall of Fame ballot. But he has plenty more to say about why he’s doing what he’s (not) doing:

“The day of reckoning I’ve been dreading for five years — ever since Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens finally left the playing field and started the countdown to Hall of Fame eligibility — has arrived.

“With no guidance from either the Hall of Fame or Major League Baseball, no clarity from the courts or Congress, and no soul-baring from the players themselves, it’s up to the 600 or so Hall of Fame voters to be judge and jury for these symbols of baseball’s steroids era.

“The questions are unprecedented. Who was dirty? Who was clean? Who got an advantage from using performance-enhancing drugs and who didn’t?

“In the end, all we have is a ton of circumstantial evidence, a general acknowledgment that it was a dirty time in baseball for a lot of players, but no checklist telling us who juiced and who was clean.

“Hall voters are left with three options:

“Vote based on players’ career records and shelve the PED debate.

“Selectively vote based on whatever suspicions one might have.

“Vote for no one.”

Haller’s colleague Paola Boivin simplistically calls 2012 “the year of the cheater” and claims we are so “scarred” by the sports deceit all around us that “we don’t know who to trust anymore.”

My objections to the War on Steroids are not subtle, nor are they conflicted, as I have written here and here and here.

The caveat has always been that I’m more concerned about the public unaccountability of the taxpayer-funded USADA than athletes who are presumed guilty merely by being charged with doping. Including Lance Armstrong.

But expressing a desire to decriminalize the use of anabolic steroids and halt the federal government’s investigative and prosecutorial powers in this area isn’t the same as cheering on athletes who dope.

And here’s where some conflicted feelings emerge. Ballots for the 2013 class of the Baseball Hall of Fame are due by Dec. 31, and a grand conundrum is unfolding over whether Barry Bonds, Roger Clemens, Mark McGwire, Sammy Sosa and Rafael Palmeiro are fit for Cooperstown.

Their names are all on the current ballot, but it’s unlikely they will get in, at least for now, because of the state of our public discourse on steroids and sports.

A number of other candidates have spoken out against the inclusion of steroids users, namely Barry Larkin and Dale Murphy, who is in his last year on a Hall of Fame ballot.

If I had a vote, both of these gentlemen would be in, especially Murphy, who played on bad teams in my hometown for too many years, which may ultimately cost him a spot in a place where he truly belongs. I do appreciate Larkin’s appeal to respect the “integrity of what the Hall of Fame stands for.”

These are important points to make, and a valuable conversation to have.

But as longtime sports journalist and Hall of Fame voter Ron Rapoport wrote recently, it’s a rather one-sided discussion, given the moralizing habits of his own tribe.

Writing on L.A. Observed over the weekend, Rapoport took the audacious view that all of those stained or dogged by steroids charges who are on the ballot ought to be voted in:

“I believe the steroid generation of players, of which these five players are among the most conspicuously accused, may well have saved baseball. I also believe these players’ greatest achievements will outlast not only their careers, but their lifetimes.

“Those of us who covered baseball during the strike that wiped out the 1994 playoffs and World Series well remember how bitter the players, owners and fans were then, and how dire the outlook for the game’s immediate future seemed. We also remember how the home run battles between Sosa and McGwire wiped away this bitterness in an instant and brought the fans running back to the ballpark in forgiveness and delight. Bonds’ assault on all-time home run records in the seasons that followed was equally transfixing as was Clemens’ age-defying march to 354 victories.”

Sports columnist Mike Lupica wrote a book celebrating the Sosa-McGwire duel, then became a come-to-Jesus anti-steroids scold when “Big Mac” was hauled before some of the same sanctimonious old birds in Congress who once hailed him for his feats.

While steroids have been banned by MLB since 1991, there wasn’t a uniform testing procedure in place until 2003. How can you draw a line across the careers of these individuals in “The Steroids Era” when the headmasters of the game couldn’t be bothered to enforce their own rules?

The moralists like to claim that players ought to observe a code of honor, but in reality few were paying much attention until anti-doping zealots gained enough media traction during the last decade. Former pitcher Tommy House (who caught Hank Aaron’s 715th home run ball in the Braves’ bullpen) is quoted by Rapoport as saying that “enhancements have been around forever.” Concluded Rapoport:

“I wonder where in the game’s lily-white, indentured-servitude, amphetamine-dispensing past, we can find total purity.”

I admit to some serious ambivalence about how I would vote, if I could. But ESPN’s Buster Olney, in assessing the obligations of the voter and claiming “it’s the writers, and the writers alone, who are the bottleneck,” really unlocks the issue for me:

“So the baseball writers ought to get out of the way rather than acting like overzealous crossing guards empowered by their ballots. The writers’ work should always reflect history, not determine legacies; that’s the work of the players, the good and the bad.”

Some of these voters are no more likely to vote for anyone linked to steroids than some on the Veterans Committee would welcome the recently departed Marvin Miller into the fold. That’s more than an omission, but a scandal bigger than anything Barry Bonds may have pumped into his body.

Isn’t anyone except a true believer uncomfortable that the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency that has brought Lance Armstrong to his knees gets a good bit of its funding through a grant from the U.S. Office of National Drug Control Policy?

Taxpayer money this is, yours and mine.

The agency that brought us the futile, deadly, incompetent “War on Drugs” is dispensing money to an organization that is doing the same on the sports front, and it finally bagged its biggest target.

I have many more questions, looking for answers.

Is this how we want to root out sports “cheats?” With the same zero tolerance approach, the same self-righteous pontificating and little to no transparency about its methods?

I have no strong feelings about Lance Armstrong. Nor did I for Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens, baseball stars whom the federal government also tried to prosecute for steroids.

It was easy to convict them in the court of public opinion for being arrogant, unlikeable assholes. It’s another thing to have absolute proof of their actions. But as the Armstrong case showed, even that isn’t necessary.

If the USADA can get an athlete with the power, profile and public support of Armstrong to yield, and not have to concretely prove a thing, imagine what it can do to anyone else it investigates.

We have become so blindly driven in our crusade against “cheaters” that we have charged the USADA to prosecute, adjudicate and then strip athletes of championships all at once, the purview of individual sports governing bodies be damned.

Even allegations against Armstrong dating back to 1998, two years before the USADA was created, and long after the normal eight-year statute of limitations have run out, are fair game.

Can we not even have a discussion about we whether we as a society should be elevating steroid use by athletes essentially to that of a crime? Because that’s what our zeal demands.

Is this really anything close to an important issue in sports?

Where is the sports media indignation about the USADA that comes out with all barrels blazing for the NCAA and BCS?

Besides this columnist? And this one? And this one, to some degree?

Paging Joe Nocera.

Instead, we get this, from the Schoolmarm-in-Chief, embodying the endless, cloying moralizing about steroid use.

If we’re going to have an organization monitoring sports doping, especially one that spends taxpayer money, doesn’t it deserve the same scrutiny as old men in bad blazers?

Who’s going to monitor the monitors? Right now there appears to be no one.

Bravo to Sally Jenkins a couple of weeks ago for calling the farcical prosecution of Barry Bonds for what it was while it was going on. And double bravo to Roger Cossack and Art Spander post-factum for saying the same thing on “Outside the Lines” on Thursday.

Even George Dorhmann argues that the jury, after being unable to reach a verdict on three other counts:

“. . . found Bonds guilty of rambling, of dancing around a question, of being (for anyone who has ever interviewed him can attest) Barry Lamar Bonds.”

Yet the feigned moral outrage from The Tribe is sucking up far too much of the oxygen. Here’s a breath of fresh air:

(video h/t Daily Motion)

Update: And Jeff Passan launches into to those waging The War on Steroids:

“The same selfishness that pervaded steroid users afflicted those on the opposite side. The anti-doping fiends profited off the drug testing they insisted upon. The moral police used the time-honored canard – the safety of children – to advocate against PED use. The cops and government turned power into score-settling trials.

“It’s no wonder baseball came out so well. Turns out MLB was no worse than the people running the War on Steroids.”

From earlier this week, Patrick Hruby pens a smart piece on the need to take a deep breath over the hysteria over steroids in sports and address the issue like adults:

“What if we’re too ignorant to judge the severity of the performance-enhancing drug problem in sports?

“What if the madness makes us ignorant, and the single greatest side effect of our ongoing War on ‘Roids is that we don’t even know what we don’t know?”

Then again, with headlines like this, don’t hold your breath. Dick Pound’s successor, take it away:

“If, after that, we still find people who are cheating, they’ve got to sit back and say, ‘What do we do now?’ ”

Licking my chops about Victor Conte coming before the WADA moralists, but he sounds too humble here.