When the dust settles, when baseball's belated investigation into steroid use ends, I bet Bud Selig is going to wish he had taken a different course of action.
He'll wish he had simply said, of the rise of steroids: We blew it. I blew it. The institution of baseball blew it. I didn't ask the right questions at the right time, and the steroid genie got out of the bottle, and there's nothing we can do to put it back now, to know for sure who was clean and who was dirty in the '90s. All we can do is clean up the sport as best we can, moving forward.
But it's too late for that now, and whatever happens in the months ahead, it's going to be ugly. If the investigation is thorough and credible, dozens (or more) of players and executives will be questioned and implicated for what they did or didn't do, and if the investigation fizzles and comes up with nothing more than Barry Bonds and a handful of other steroid users -- i.e., scapegoats -- the effort will be mocked widely as a sham.
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Buster Olney
