There was actually a hearing on steroids yesterday in the US House by a totally different committee:

It was coincidental that the Energy and Commerce subcommittee had scheduled its own hearing for yesterday on steroids. It focused not just on baseball, but on steroid use in professional football and among college and high school athletes.

They also had someone with a scientific background to put testing in perspective:

Charles Yesalis, a Penn State health policy professor and sports-drug expert, told the subcommittee that a big problem is that drug testing is not a perfect science. "Just because you test negative does not mean you are a clean athlete. We are limited to what is technologically available," Yesalis said.

What I don't understand is why so many people think the drug testing policy has no teeth:

"The real deterrent is these public figures will be outed," Coonelly said. "In many circles, Sammy Sosa, who otherwise has a Hall of Fame career, is known as a cheater because he used a cork bat. It means a lot more than a slap on the wrist to be branded as a cheater," he said.

But several subcommittee members said embarrassing players was not enough. Marsha Blackburn, a Tennessee Republican, characterized baseball's punishment for first-time steroid-policy violators - a 10-day suspension - as "a slap on the wrist."

We don't even know if the original plan was going to work, because it was changed before we really got a chance to see what would happen. We have one data point, where the percentage of players testing positive went from 5-7% in 2003 to 1-2% in 2004, the first year of penalties.

And since when is a ten-game suspension a slap on the wrist? How many teams can afford to lose a star for ten games? I don't believe you can call up a replacement during a suspension, so the whole team has to play short-handed. You're really punishing 25 players, not just one. These politicians should get a clue.

Update: This article by Murray Chass is a must read.

Rob Manfred, the chief labor executive for baseball's owners, said the players were in the committee members' minds when they scheduled the hearing. At a March 2 meeting with committee members, Manfred said, he was told that the hearing would "give players a chance to clear their names."

The remark raised painful echoes from more than 50 years ago, when a fellow named Joe McCarthy, not the manager, held Congressional hearings into another matter and gave people a chance to clear their names (implicating others at the same time).

"Mr. Sosa, are you now or have you ever been a member of the Com ... I mean, a steroids user?"

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