The steroid bust

Maury Brown is making a lot of noise about the recent bust of a former NYMets batboy, Kirk Radomski, for steroid distribution. Here's an excerpt:

On the face of the news from yesterday, one might say that by the time one Kirk J. Radomski left his employment with Mets in 1995, the damage might not be as great as one thinks. After all, the first “survey test” for steroids wasn’t conducted until 2003 and regular testing of players till 2004.

Unfortunately, Radomski continued dealing in illegal performance-enhancing drugs until his Long Island, N.Y. home was raided in 2005.

With the FBI’s announcement yesterday of a plea agreement, there has been 17 months in-between the raid on Radomski’s home. Almost two years for the FBI to work with him in gaining valuable information on players—or, possibly dealing PEDs to players through the FBI in order to gain evidence on players. Could video surveillance of a sale or the possibility of Radomski wearing a wire when a deal was made have occurred? Given that those methods have been used with investigations into street drugs, how easy would it be to use them when the names associated could be star MLB players? Ambitious agents would surely like to see one or more star PED users mounted on their wall.

Obviously, much of what he's saying is speculative. But it will be interesting to see how big this thing gets. If we get into a situation in which there is verifyable and unambiguous evidence implicating a large number of current or former players, this could be an enormous scandal. And MLB and the MLB Players Associations will have no one to blame but themselves.