Baseball's drug policy still off track.

Byline: Ron Bellamy / The Register-Guard

While Major League Baseball puffed out its chest, and high-fived itself, and came out of the dugout for a couple of curtain calls after adopting a new steroid-testing program this week, you wondered whether sprinter Torri Edwards mustered similar enthusiasm.

You might remember Torri Edwards, Olympic bronze medalist in 2000. She competed at Southern California, where she was a three-time Pac-10 champion. She has run at Hayward Field in the USA Track & Field championships, the NCAA meet and the Pre Classic.

And you might remember, too, that last year she received a two-year ban for a first-time doping offense.

It cost her a berth in the Olympic Games last year, after she'd finished second in the 100 meters in the Olympic Trials in Sacramento.

It has cost her, at age 27, the heart of her career.

In a meet in Martinique last April, she tested positive for a banned stimulant, nikethamide. She's stated that it was inadvertent, that her physical therapist bought her some glucose there and she took it, not realizing that it contained the banned substance.

"I didn't take the glucose to help myself run faster," she said last year. "I took it to make me feel better."

Indeed, Edwards told reporters at the Trials that she'd received an appearance fee to run in the early season meet; whether she won - which would have been the motivation for intentionally taking a stimulant - or jogged through it wouldn't have mattered.

It seems to be a sad story, a case of Draconian justice, though arguably there might be more sympathy for Edwards from those of us outside the sport than inside it.

Because the rule is that the athlete is ultimately responsible for everything that goes into his or her body, and Edwards had the double misfortune of having a positive test in an era in which the World Anti-Doping Agency isn't inclined to show leniency.

Letter of the law, and if you look at some of the more flagrant cases, maybe that's understandable.

But Edwards' plight helps illustrate what Major League Baseball's new plan doesn't do. And it demonstrates, once again, that Olympic athletes in general, and track and field athletes in particular, are judged by a far higher standard, a double standard, when it comes to competing clean.

For one thing, baseball doesn't even deal with stimulants, the issue in the Edwards case, not steroids. In baseball, use of amphetamines is considered to be more widespread than steroids.

And then there are the new and improved penalties for players testing positive for using steroids, which baseball could subtitle "Better Than Nothing."

Remember that Edwards got a two-year ban for a one-time evidence of a banned stimulant. A second offense would be a lifetime ban.

In baseball's plan, a first offense for steroids would be a 10-day suspension. A second offense would be 30 days, a third would be 60 days and a fourth offense would be one year, all without pay.

In other words, a baseball player could in theory test positive for steroids three times in one season and be the hero in the World Series.

Wrote Rick Morrissey in the Chicago Tribune: "If your livelihood is connected to how many needles you stick in your butt, you might be willing to take a chance on a 10-day suspension, which you can bet your bottom dollar will be appealed by the players' union. If your livelihood brings you $10 million a year, you have plenty of bottom dollars."

Baseball has a union, too, which track and field athletes don't have.

It's easy to suggest that if baseball really wanted to be serious about eliminating the use of steroids that it would adopt the strict penalties of Olympic sports, but you have to think that the owners don't want to risk losing the drawing-card stars, and that the union would never accept that kind of a plan.

So baseball has its new plan, better than what it had before, but "tough" only in that comparison.

You want to talk tough, go talk to Torri Edwards.