But that was the peak. The Manny Ramirez–David Ortiz combo? Ramirez was already serving a drug-test-related suspension, and the news that Ortiz was implicated was just like the news that Ramirez was implicated, only a little fatter and slower.

The idea of the list is much more exciting than the list itself. Everything you didn’t know you knew about performance-enhancing drugs, all in one place. Just let the list out, and let the public stand face to face with the truth about drugs and baseball.

“Name them all and get it over and let baseball go on,” Hank Aaron said. Put the names out, Mark Teixeira said. Put the names out, Johnny Damon said.

Damon’s name is on one list already. The Yankees outfielder is No. 3 on a list of 103 baseball players that you can turn up if you Google “baseball steroids list”—or that you can find even more quickly by Googling “fake steroids list.”

People who post the Internet list like to make a point of saying they don’t really believe what’s on it. There are plenty of forensic criticisms of the list—too many Red Sox (it’s a Yankees fan’s hoax!), too few no-name players, suspicious formatting—but the main objection to the list is a matter of attitude. The steroids scandal is about the feeling of being duped, or worse, letting oneself be duped. So now the desire is to be in the know but also to be knowing, to be wised up.

That said, you wouldn’t care to bet that any particular player on the fake list is not also on the real list. Plenty of the names have already gone into the history books for being otherwise implicated for performance-enhancing drugs—Rafael Palmeiro, Gary Sheffield, Barry Bonds, Benito Santiago—and even more are the sort of names that history has a hard time paying attention to. Wasn’t that journeyman utility infielder already caught for something? What about that slow-footed corner outfielder? Or that other slow-footed corner outfielder? It’s like trying to keep track of who used to play for the Rangers and who used to play for the Astros. Six years is a long time in baseball.

So the Internet list hovers on the edge of public view, not quite fit for discussion. Information does not exactly want to be free, at least not in this case. Information would rather be certified by someone who knows what he or she is doing: The New York Times and Sports Illustrated, the old media of record, slowly digging out the names on the real list, one or two at a time, like scrupulous archaeologists clearing a site with brushes. Look, here we have … what appears to be … yes, here is Sammy Sosa. Definitely Sammy Sosa. Sammy Sosa, “according to lawyers with knowledge of the drug-testing results,” was on the list of players who failed drug tests.

Thanks, lawyers. Come on. You gave up the guy shaped like the Thing, the guy who hit 243 home runs in four years. That’s like shooting a farm-raised pig on a captive hunt. Put the names out!

Or better yet, don’t. The ethical problems are bad enough: Sammy Sosa may be a fraud and a hypocrite, but his drug test was supposed to be anonymous. Turning a private screening program into a public blacklist is a much more serious breach of trust than trashing the home-run record book ever was—even if the list were to tell us what we want to know.

And it won’t. The secret list, the one seized by drug investigators and passed around and leaked, is not the final word on performance-enhancing drugs in baseball. It is a list of 104 names of players who were told in 2003 that they would be tested for drugs, and were then associated with a positive drug-test result. As with any drug-testing program, some of those positives were false positives: Major League Baseball has said that only 96 players were ultimately counted as positive, and that the players’ union disputes some of those 96 results.

So after we learn who the 104 guilty players are, it will be time to get the list of the eight guilty-but-not-guilty players, and then the list of however many players’ guilt that is in dispute. Meanwhile, the list will still be missing all the drug-assisted players who got a false negative, or who took a masking agent, or who had moved on to drugs too advanced for the drug tests to catch.

What can the real list tell us that the fake list can’t? Yes, it would be funny if one of the anti-steroids crusaders like Curt Schilling or Jeff Kent showed up on the list. But it wouldn’t be surprising. Jeff Kent hit more home runs after his 35th birthday than he did before his 30th. Maybe he’s a clean guy who happened to hit like a steroids guy. Nobody knows.

One national sportswriter wrote recently that he would give up on baseball if Derek Jeter’s name showed up on the list, because Jeter seems like a guy who would quit the game rather than “cheat to compete.” That’s nice, but Derek Jeter never refused to cross home plate when a known steroid cheater like Alex Rodriguez or Gary Sheffield knocked him in. He’s a team player, and he plays to win.

Every time a drug list comes up—the fake one, the Mitchell Report, the collected works of Jose Canseco—it looks at first glance as if your favorite team is especially implicated. You can find the suspect list online with the names of all Mets-linked players underlined: 30-some out of 103 players. Those dirty Mets! But it’s mostly perception: Ballplayers knock around, and the Mets’ alumni are other teams’ alumni, too. Gary Sheffield is a Met and a Yankee—and a Brewer, Padre, Dodger, Brave, Marlin and Tiger.

Alex Rodriguez and the Yankees have the best record in the American League at the moment. Manny Ramirez and the Dodgers have the best record in the National League. Here comes baseball history, or more of the same baseball history.

The last championship Yankees were a steroids team. The Red Sox who knocked them off were a steroids team. The Baltimore Orioles who sat in fourth place and watched them were a steroids team. Nobody’s roster was hydroponically grown in a clean room. Everybody comes out of the same dirt.

editorial@observer.com

A couple of ace numbers crunchers, David Ezra, author of Asterisk: Home Runs, Steroids and the Rush to Judgment, and J.C. Bradbury, author of The Baseball Economist: The Real Game Exposed, have thrown some chin music at the ongoing charges that  Clemens got any kind of statistical boost from performance-enhancing drugs.

In the mainstream media, Clemens's guilt has long been a foregone conclusion, the case against him as airtight as the one against Barry Bonds.  But there are a few dissenters, or at least some who want more conclusive proof.

Last summer, Bob Costas outlined an argument for skepticism on Real Time with Bill Maher.  

"To much of the media, Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens make a perfect pair of bookends: one black, one white. One the greatest hitter in the modern game, the other the greatest pitcher."

But, as Costas cautioned, "Their careers are not the same.  Bonds's numbers took off into the stratosphere after his association with BALCO. All Clemens did was maintain a career that was already on track for the Hall of Fame."

Shortly after the Maher show, I asked Costas to elaborate his point.

"I'm not saying that Clemens is guilty or not guilty of using some form of PEDs," he told me. "What I'm saying is that there's nothing in his career numbers that would indicate any kind of artificial enhancement. I think a lot of people who assume that his later career performance was artificially enhanced haven't done their homework." 

Bradbury and Ezra, who have done their homework, agree. "The late career spike in Clemens' performance," says Bradbury, "just doesn't fit McNamee's accusations. First, the alleged use of human growth hormones took place, according to McNamee, at times when Clemens was pitching very well. Why would he have bothered?  Second, Clemens' late success, though remarkable, is far from unprecedented.  Nolan Ryan, Curt Schilling, Randy Johnson and numerous others can be cited as examples of pitchers who excelled well past their physical prime. There's nothing exceptional about Clemens' last few seasons." 

According to Ezra, "Clemens was a better pitcher than Nolan Ryan, but his career swings are similar. Ryan had some relative down years at ages 29, 31, 33, and even 38, but he was durable and pitched very well from age 41-44. Clemens had down years at 33, 36, and 39.  But, like Ryan, he was very good at ages 41-43. I haven't heard anyone throw charges of chemical enhancement at Nolan Ryan." 

The numbers support both Ezra and Bradbury. McNamee claims that Clemens' use of HGH began in 1998, a season in which he won the American League Cy Young award with a 20-6 record, a 2.65 ERA, and led the league with 271 strikeouts.  The problem is that Clemens was even better the year before, when McNamee doesn't claim to have supplied him with HGH.  In 1997, Clemens was 21-7 with a 2.05 ERA; he actually had more strikeouts, 292 to 271, and pitched 30 more innings, 264 to 234.7, in 1997 than in 1998.

Costas points out that discussions of Clemens' Hall of Fame worthiness should at least begin by acknowledging that he was a legitimate candidate before McNamee became his personal trainer. "I'm really amazed," he says, "that anyone would question that Clemens was Hall of Fame worthy before 1998. He won more than 20 games four times and 18 games in three other seasons. Nearly all his best years were from 1984 through 1997." 

By any objective yardstick, Costas is right. In his first 14 seasons, Clemens led the American League in wins three times; in his last 10 seasons, after his association with McNamee, he led just once, 1998.   From 1986-1999, he led the league in ERA five times; from 1998-2005 twice. Before McNamee, Clemens was first in strikeouts four times and second four times; after McNamee, he led the AL in whiffs just once, 1998, and finished second only once, in 2002.  (Nolan Ryan led the National League in strikeouts four times in his final five seasons.) 

Measured by a favorite tool of sabermatricians, Adjusted ERA (which allows for park factors and league averages), Clemens had six of his best eight seasons before 1998; measured by another, WHIP (walks and hits per nine innings), he had all his best seasons before 1998.

Both Roger Clemens and Barry Bonds were 35 when their alleged PED use began.  Clemens continued to be a great pitcher for most of the rest of his career, but his post-35 performance isn't in the same universe as Bonds'.  The best all-around hitting stat yet developed is Adjusted OPS, which combines on-base percentage and slugging average then adjusts them for ball parks and league averages.  By Adjusted OPS, all four of Bonds's best seasons came from 2001 through 2004, from ages 36 through 39.  If a chemical substance affected Bonds's performance over that span—and Ezra makes a detailed argument in Asterisk that many factors other than PEDs could have impacted Bonds's performance—there's no statistical evidence that Clemens got a similar boost.

Bradbury takes the argument one step further. 

"The best evidence for a power pitchers' potency is strikeouts.  Clemens's strikeout rate relative to the league declined as he aged. If he was getting some artificial help, wouldn't we have expected him to have improved in this area?  The one thing that jumps out at you when you look at the numbers for Clemens' last several seasons is not striking out batters but preventing walks. That's the part of his game least likely to have been affected by PEDs. I think this lends support to the idea that Clemens was able to maintain effectiveness as he got older because he simply got smarter and tougher."

Benjamin Disraeli famously said that there are three kinds of lies - "lies, damned lies, and statistics." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lies,_damned_lies,_and_statistics

If the feds or Brian McNamee's lawyers finally bring Roger Clemens down, it won't be because of his statistics. 

About an hour after the news was announced yesterday, Greg Anderson, a longtime trainer of Bonds who was in jail for refusing to answer questions about the longtime Giants star, was released. Of the statements indicated in the indictment to be perjury, the vast majority of them involve Bonds’s interactions with Anderson directly—characterizations Anderson would be in a position to refute.

While the indictment presents an array of unhappy alternatives for Bonds, it’s a potential disaster for the league.

Calls from the fans and media to censure Bonds and eradicate his records from baseball’s official books will only intensify. But with Bonds merely indicted, but not convicted, Major League Baseball is going to find it difficult to act decisively enough to satisfy the public.

There is little-to-no precedent for baseball’s response to the Bonds indictment.

The National Football League suspended Michael Vick for a year for his role in facilitating dog fights, but did so after Vick had already copped to the charges. And baseball’s all-time hits leader Pete Rose agreed to a lifetime ban by baseball long before admitting to betting on baseball games, and less than a year later, the Baseball Hall of Fame made any player banned by baseball ineligible for the Hall of Fame.

But these acts did not directly contribute to the player’s success on the field. While the indictment doesn’t do so either—no one is claiming that Bonds hit more home runs because he obstructed justice—what he lied about, according to the indictment, is taking steroids and human growth hormone.

The closest thing baseball has seen since the investigation into Rose’s betting is the current inquiry by former Senator George Mitchell into the use of performance-enhancing drugs in baseball. Mitchell has promised to release his findings prior to the end of the season, and the combination of his information and the indictment would surely be too much for Commissioner Bud Selig to ignore.

But if the charges don’t stick, and Selig uses them as part of his cause in banning Bonds from the game, MLB will face a monumental lawsuit.

The easiest part of this for baseball may be whether Bonds plays in 2008. His contract with the Giants ended following the 2007 season, and the team announced late in the campaign that they would not be bringing Bonds back. It is hard to imagine any major league team taking on the public relations nightmare, not to mention the risk of an indicted left fielder or designated hitter, even though Bonds posted an on base-plus-slugging percentage higher than anyone in baseball besides Alex Rodriguez.

The harder question will be whether Bonds can be banned symbolically from the game. He’d be kept out of the Hall of Fame. But what of his home run record?

Even if baseball mandated that Bonds’s records carry an asterisk or be erased entirely, how could it be enforced? Would the fact that he hit all those home runs be any more ignorable if he’s convicted than if he isn’t?

There are no good scenarios here for baseball. The league’s executives will just have to hope now that Alex Rodriguez stays healthy long enough to see to it that Bonds’ reign as Home Run King is a short one.

Years ago in Minnesota, the late great Zoilo Versalles , former MVP shortstop, told Tim Carlson that trainers fed baseball players "greenies"—amphetamines—so they could get up for day games after night games, overcome travel weariness, just about anything. Sometimes transformed his game from a first inning error to third inning brilliance, Versalles said. Or as he would explain to his coach, "Boss I was just concentrating..."

I hear rumors that amphetamines are still an important part of the game. HGH, steroids, greenies—what's the difference?

It seems to me there is something to be admired in the way that Bonds has conducted himself lately under all this contempt. I don't mean the sulky withdrawn angry bizarre part, but his stoicism. His unflinching response when Houston Astros' pitcher Russ Springer threw inside on him three times before hitting him, nearly beaning him, and got a standing ovation from the Astros fans for it, the jerks. Barry Bonds has managed to tune out alot of rage, not to hear it, not to let it bother him, or to try not anyway. Won't you give him that?

For this reason I can't help but wince every time I buy a bird from, say, Tyson or Perdue, well knowing that it has been shot up with more growth hormones than Barry Bonds. Yes, there are organic and so-called "free-range" chickens (an elastic term), but as of yet, few major supermarket chains carry them. And if they do, they most likely come from large-scale free-range farms which, by USDA definition, need only provide the birds unobstructed access to the outdoors. In practice, however, most remain in the barn with hundreds or thousands of other birds, because that's where the food is.

I have always been intrigued by the live poultry markets that can be found in some of the ethnic neighborhoods in the city-mostly Latino and Asian. Recently, I drove past a busy one on 125th Street and Amsterdam Avenue. Called La Granja Live Poultry #2 (the original is farther north, in Inwood), it is a penitential-looking, two-story cement rectangle with iron bars covering two boarded-over windows-really stimulates the appetite.

I did not have time to drop in that day, but I decided to return and maybe make some purchases in several of these markets in order to see how they operate (are they clean? Are they rigorously inspected?), how the animals are treated, who shops there and, just as important, how the chickens taste.

Poultry has been in the news for some months now because of outbreaks of the disease avian influenza, most seriously in the U.S. in Delaware and Maryland-an affliction that, in its most virulent stage, can wipe out tens of thousands of chickens. Avian influenza does not affect a chicken's meat, and it is extremely rare for humans to contract the disease.

My sidekick on this mission was Barry Wine, who was-for the benefit of readers born after the Watergate break-in-one of the most influential chefs of the past 25 years at his groundbreaking American restaurant, the Quilted Giraffe, which operated in Manhattan from 1979 to 1992. The man knows his chicken.

On a blustery Thursday afternoon, we hopped into Barry's Mercedes and, with scant help from his fancy dashboard mapping gizmo, eventually arrived at a dispiriting stretch of 122nd Street in East Harlem. In the middle of the block was a garage-like space with corrugated metal doors and the pastoral name Chicken Farm New York.

In the front was a tollbooth-sized office, but no one inside; the long rectangular space held five seven-foot-high stacked steel cages that were teeming with all sorts of feathered inmates: white chickens, black-feathered chickens (new to me), small turkeys, brown-feathered hens, sizable ducks and (cute) rabbits.

Some of the cages were more densely populated than others, with several holding so many birds that they could barely turn around. This roommate problem was gradually ameliorated, however, with every visit of the grim reaper.

I had expected a horrendous stench, but it wasn't too bad, owing in large part to a bent, knotty old man who was hosing down the place with great zeal. As he seemed to be the only employee on the premises, I asked him, both in English and in Spanish, how we could go about buying a chicken. Apparently he was unfamiliar with both tongues. He looked at me with bewilderment until I gestured, performing my best mime of a man holding a sizable bird.

He pointed at a glass partition, where we saw an aproned woman, a Mexican, taking a cleaver to a couple of recently departed chickens. The long rectangular room with stainless-steel counters was quite clean, having recently been hosed down by our friend.

The New York State Department of Agriculture and Markets strictly monitors the approximately 70 live-animal markets in the five boroughs. State officials and representatives of the poultry industry had told me that live-poultry markets are shrinking in most American cities, but in New York they continue to expand to meet the demands of arriving immigrants.

Inspectors are supposed to visit the markets monthly to assess their cleanliness, the health of the animals and their treatment. Four times a year, the markets are required to close for several days to receive a major disinfecting.

Whereas major outbreaks of avian influenza in Texas and Delaware involved live-poultry markets, New York so far has been spared.

"We have the most strict regulations in the nation for live-poultry markets," said Jessica A. Chittenden, a spokeswoman for the department. "Public health is No. 1; the health of the birds is a close second." Fines for violations are relatively minor, starting with $300 for a first offense and $600 for a second. After that, Ms. Chittenden said, the department moves in to help them correct the violations.

"We really don't have a lot of problems with them," she maintained.

Most of the birds sold in New York City's live-poultry markets come from small end mid-size breeders in Pennsylvania and New Jersey. They are not necessarily organic or free-range.

" ¡Hola, como estás! " I called out to the woman. Carmen Acevedo Jimenez had been working at Chicken Farm New York for a month-though you wouldn't know it watching her eviscerate a chicken with the speed of a Vegas poker dealer. Since the boss wasn't there, she invited us to follow a bird from its clucking cell to a plastic shopping bag. (It gets a little gory here, so you might want to send the kids to bed.)

The first stop was a holding room with a long stainless-steel table inset with what resembled several inverted megaphones. Carmen first passed a knife over the chicken's throat, then placed it, head down, into one of the cones so the blood would drain out.

In about five minutes, the chicken was transferred to an amazing defeathering machine. A steel bowl about four feet across held what looked like a huge ball bearing that was studded with corrugated rubber cylinders. The ball bearing rotates at blinding speed, and when the chicken is tossed in, the feathers are removed in seconds.

At this point, Carmen removed the internal organs ("Youwantfeetand head?"), rinsed them and placed them in a plastic tote bag-still very warm.

Barry and I each ordered afour-poundchickenat roughly $1.25 per pound, and a duck at $2.50 a pound.

Our next stop was the La Granja Live Poultry #2, in West Harlem. The odor was prevalent here, but not overwhelming. (In the interest of investigative journalism concerning this odor issue, I returned five days later: The stench was so powerful that it nearly blew off my baseball cap. Maybe I had arrived between hosings.)

The menu here was the same as at the first market. The birds were very crowded. Two customers, a creased older woman of Puerto Rican descent and a Dominican woman, stopped by for a single chicken each. I asked the former why she bought live poultry instead of going to the supermarket.

"It's good. It's real," she replied in Spanish. "It's barato [a good buy]."

The other woman told me that when she was a teenager in the Dominican Republic, they always had fresh chickens.

"Sometimes I got to chop off the head," she recalled with a smile.

Several workers in long white coats dashed in and out of the execution chamber, while the ladies, both in head scarves, waited patiently.

Dinner in hand, Barry and I took our leave for the taste test. That night, I coated the duck with a zesty spice rub and placed sliced apples and prunes in the cavity (I served it with a prune, orange and red wine reduction). The breast meat was dense and rosy, with a pronounced gamelike flavor. The taut, muscular legs could double as croquet mallets, so they require long braising.

Similarly, the chicken breast was firm and moist, with a lovely golden skin. It tasted like chicken.