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It's time for baseball to raise its collective hand and acknowledge the foul.
Step forward and offer a mea culpa, possibly with a tear but most certainly with a heartfelt apology.
Not just Roger Clemens, Barry Bonds, or Manny Ramirez, though that would certainly help.
Not just Bud Selig and the rest of his Park Avenue crew, who all ignored the warning signs as baseballs soared out of America's ballparks and a nation full of suckers poured through the turnstiles.
Not just the trainers who stuck a needle into a player's butt to swell not only swagger and stats but shrink something far more dear.
It's everyone.
Anyone and everyone, who has been part of the game needs to step forward and say they're sorry.
The only person with the requisite courage to speak out, currently, is Jose Canseco but no one is listening.
Pity.
Managers like Joe Torre and Tony LaRussa need to apologize for their hear-no evil, see-no-evil, speak-no-evil approach. Torre simply stating that he's not surprised to hear Sammy Sosa was the latest to be linked to performance-enhancing drug use isn't good enough.
Selig in a joint appearance with baseball's labor chief Don Fehr need to hold a news conference and say they're sorry.
Major League Baseball sat idly by as anecdotal evidence continued to grow as quickly as Bonds' cap size. An embarrassing work stoppage that killed the 1994 World Series was put to rest only by the bloated home run race undertaken by Sosa and Mark McGwire.
We now know, it was a fraud perpetuated on the marketplace.
Fehr, his union and the players should not escape scrutiny either. They repeatedly stalled on approval of drug testing and not until this decade did they reluctantly accept the testing that exposed the likes of Alex Rodriguez, Sosa, and Ramirez.
But those are the easy targets as are the 102 still nameless positive results from the round of survey testing in 2003. Should all of those names be released? Absolutely. Until the truth is out, the lies are all anyone hears.
Jason Giambi, one of the few who publicly has admitted to the use of PEDs, while furthering closure on the issue by his own admissions, is continuing the problem by his latest comments.
As McGwire so infamously said he was not going to talk about the past during his appearance in front of a Congressional committee, Giambi fell back on that same tired excuse when recently questioned about Sosa.
"You want to keep moving forward," Giambi said in the Los Angeles Times. "You can't keep going backward."
The problem is, moving forward is impossible without understanding the past and that is murky at best.
The career home run list is pecked with needle marks.
Six of the top 17 home run hitters in the history of the sport have been implicated to steroid use one way or the other. That includes record-holder Bonds and his alleged ties to BALCO to Ramirez and his current 50-game suspension.
In between, you've got Sosa, McGwire, Rafael Palmeiro, and Rodriguez.
The 500-homer club used to be a significant achievement, but that sextet rendered it a joke.
Should they be stricken from the record book? Unfortunately, no. History is history and those numbers stand as a reflection of an era.
Which turns to the rest of the players, coaches, managers, and trainers, possibly even some reporters, who saw something and did nothing.
Baseball is a community unlike any other in sports. No other teammate spends the amount of time together as baseball players do. From spring training through September, they're together nearly every day.
They get to know each other: personalities, idiosyncrasies, faults, and habits.
For anyone involved from this stained era of baseball to claim they didn't know something was going on is not being truthful. And in saying that, they're all complicit in the crime.
Further, their efforts are suspect. Pick a name. No one is above suspicion.
That is why the full list of names from the 2003 round of testing needs to be revealed.
That is why Selig and Fehr need to address the American public, who support the multibillion industry that is Major League Baseball, and apologize for allowing the cheating scandal to epitomize the very pinnacle of the sport.
That is why anyone who saw anything needs to stop hiding behind the thin stitched line and admit that it was going on.
Until that happens, there is no moving forward and baseball will not truly heal.
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