STEROID STORY MUST PLAY OUT.

Byline: KEVIN MODESTI

It can be hard to watch these days when men with baseball in their blood talk about men with needles in their veins.

Maybe you've seen Tom Grieve, who as the Texas Rangers general manager traded for Jose Canseco, suggest on TV that the real crime isn't what Canseco alleges about drug abuse but how Canseco's book violates the ``sanctimonity'' of the clubhouse.

Which, in its own clumsy way, tells us two things.

The steroids apologists, defenders and deniers are at such a loss for words after a winter storm of steroids news that they're having to invent new ones.

And they'll say anything, including changing the subject to Canseco's tarnished reputation, if it will divert attention from the spreading stain on the sport.

Old baseball guys like Grieve - ex-player, father of a player, club executive, broadcaster - have to be wondering when this is going to go away.

Without violating any sanctimonity, I'll tell them when this begins to go away.

It begins to go away only after Barry Bonds breaks the career home-run record. It begins to go away only after the story reaches the logical end. It begins to go away only after the scandal is played all the way out.

The game has a way of writing its own narrative better than Red Smith or even Canseco can.

This time it's about the revelations of muscle-building drug abuse that lead fans to question many of the performances upon which baseball's recent popularity are based.

There is no other way for it to end than for Bonds, the greatest player connected to the steroids scandal, to break Hank Aaron's lifetime homers record, the most famous statistical standard in American sports.

Then we'll all have to come to grips with how we really feel about drug-inflated statistics, and the hierarchy that resisted meaningful steroids testing and sanctions for too long, will have to deal with the fallout.

Until Bonds hits 53 more homers, it's going to be painful months of charges, countercharges and philosophizing.

Back on their heels after the investigation of Bay Area Laboratory Co- Operative attached hard steroid evidence to Bonds, Jason Giambi and Gary Sheffield, baseball's leaders see a hanging curveball in the Canseco book (``Juiced: Wild Times, Rampant `Roids, Smash Hits and How Baseball Got Big'') that's due to come out next week.

Canseco reportedly will smear some of the biggest names in the game, charging that he encouraged or knew of steroid use by teammates Mark McGwire, Ivan Rodriguez, Juan Gonzalez and Rafael Palmeiro.

The 1988 American League MVP reportedly will imply that President Bush, when he was the Rangers' owner, must have known his players were jabbing themselves with weapons of mass construction.

But baseball looks at Canseco and sees the ultimate in unbelievable witnesses, a scofflaw who conceivably wrote his book for the money and the attention, and to hell with the Hall of Famers he drags through the mud.

Nobody should be convicted based on the uncorroborated testimony of a Jose Canseco.

On the other hand, there are not going to be any unimpeachable witnesses in this thing.

If you were close enough to steroid use to be certain it happened, you're soiled.

Canseco's newfound prominence is another way in which the scandal is played all the way out: Some of the sport's beloved figures are not only touched by steroid allegations, they are wrestled down to the moral level of one of the game's seediest characters.

Baseball deserves all of this.

In San Francisco on other business Wednesday, Bud Selig declined to comment on the Canseco book while trying to defend the major leagues' slow response to steroid speculation that began in Canseco's late-1980s heyday.

``As a sport we have done everything that we could at this point,'' the commissioner said. ``There are immediate penalties, random testing. A player gets publicly named if, heaven forbid, he does test positively. I'm very sensitive about this whole subject, but I think the sport has addressed it.''

Notice that Selig said baseball has done everything it could ``at this point,'' not ``to this point.'' It installed a credible drugs policy last month, only after it had nothing close to that for years.

A little credit to Selig for mincing words but stopping short of actually making them up.

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Photo:

Commissioner Bud Selig is surrounded by reporters Wednesday in San Francisco. He refused to comment on Jose Canseco's book.

Marcio Jose Sanchez/Associated Press