<strong><u><em>Ted Green:</strong></u></em> A-Rod and baseball’s true lies

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Multiply that lie by 600. That’s my best guess as to how many major leaguers used steroids or are still taking HGH.

And because HGH, human growth hormone, is undetectable except by blood testing, which the players’ union won’t allow, 60% of Major League Baseball still being on the juice right now might be a generous estimation.

What baseball fan isn’t now fed up to here with all the half-truths, stretched truths, contrived alibis and outright lying that marks baseball’s dark and dreary Drug Era?

What fan who knows the numbers 60, 61, 56 and 511 by heart isn’t heartsick over the way the integrity and believability of the grand old game has been torn at its very fabric?

Does anyone alive believe the single-season ‘record’ of 73 jacks by the Balco Bomber, Barry Bonds, or the 70 by Mark McGwire before him, are the same as the Babe’s 60 or Roger Maris’ 61?

Rafael Palmeiro, Sammy Sosa, McGwire, Bonds, Roger Clemens and now A-Rod -- Pinnochios, every one of them.

Even in coming clean, so to speak, in his scripted mea culpa to the press today in Tampa, while conveniently throwing his unnamed cousin under the bus, Alex Rodriguez still couldn’t quite get it right. Instead, he conveniently went to the We Were Young and Stupid and Didn’t Know What We Were Doing card. This would not score many points on the Cosellian Telling It Like It Is scale.

‘I didn’t think it was steroids,’ he said. ‘It was just like amateur hour. Just two guys doing an amateur and immature thing.’

Oh please.

Today, you know baseball players are lying about performance enhancing drugs when their mouths move.

It’s gotten to the point where it’s beyond the pale; you can’t believe anyone anymore. And unfortunately, the players who aren’t juicing today, the minority, are now all guilty by association, anyway.

I had to laugh the other day when, during a national radio interview, the well-intended Tom Lasorda feigned shock that A-Rod was among the big fish users we know about.

The Dodgers had a small armada of big, burly pitchers break down physically. Kevin Brown, Darren Dreifort, Eric Gagne, Brad Penny, Jason Schmidt. Who knows why they broke down, and no one is saying steroids were involved. But the suspicion is there now. How many surgeries between them? Who can count that high? Every one done (or was it done in?) before their natural times were over.

I doubt Lasorda was shocked. He was just trying to circle the wagons and protect the game he has loved professionally for 60 years.

This much I’m 1000% sure of: Baseball has been one big pharmacy for at least 10 years.

Pharmacies R Us, better living through chemistry.

I know about weight rooms and personal trainers, but have you been to the ballpark lately and seen the sheer size of these guys?

For me, and hopefully for you too, there should be no more surprises. Just melancholy shrugs of resignation. That’s the only emotion left.

If they won’t implement blood testing because the players’ union is too powerful and too frightened, then Bud Selig, who presided over this awful fiasco, should at least order a Part 2 of baseball’s holy grail, the record book.

It is baseball’s everlasting history and, to true baseball fans, it matters a great deal.

So have Part 2 start in 1998. It’s an arbitrary year but close enough. Anyone who played from ’98 on, guilty or not ... their records automatically go into Part 2.

It’s the only way I can think of, besides a trillion asterisks, to preserve the sanctity of the book we still believe in, Part 1.

Let Part 1 exist forever on its own, unblemished and unscarred by Part 2.

Part 1 ... The Book of Job.

Part 2 ... the other one.

-- Ted Green

Ted Green used to cover sports for the L.A. Times. He is now Senior Sports Producer for KTLA Prime News.