FanHouse

Baseball has long been complacent about its role in this big old steroids mess. For years, Bud Selig and owners and GMs and basically everyone in a position of power actively looked the other way while players got bigger, stronger, more powerful, and gave certain sportswriters a chance to be indignant for the rest of their natural born lives. It was a dark age.

But behold! MLB -- alongside the NFL, the U.S. Olympic Committee, and the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency -- are plunging effort into research necessary to keep up with the scientists that create and eventually sell performance enhancing drugs. Say it ain't so:

Priorities for the collaborative will include underwriting research that addresses:

• New methods to more cost-effectively detect and deter the use of banned and illegal substances at every level of sport
• Identification and detection of designer substances the consequences of doping, from both a medical and ethical perspective
• The further development of a widely-available, cost-effective test to detect Human Growth Hormone (HGH) As the initial Founding Partners, the USOC, USADA, MLB and NFL have collectively committed to contribute $10 million to this landmark collaborative. Each Founding Partner will have one representative on the Board of Governors, which will oversee the research collaborative.

Some of the goals are worthy; some are not. Obviously, the main benefit here would be establishing testing procedures that are impossible to escape and keeping research on par with the various masking agents players use to hide their use. Searching for an HGH test? Probably a waste of resources, considering we don't know if it really helps baseball performance. In any case, it's a step in the right direction. Maybe Bud is going to act after all.

(Photo note, in case you're wondering: That's Italian cyclist Ruggero Marzoli arriving at his HGH hearing with some Olympic court or something. I liked the photo because that is one. sweet. dude.