Roger Clemens and Pete Rose burst into the news on the same day last week. Can Barry Bonds be far behind?

Clemens, Bonds and Rose are Major League Baseball’s triumvirate from hell. Clemens, seven-time winner of the Cy Young award, was indicted by a federal grand jury, charged with lying to a grand jury about his use of performance-enhancing drugs. Bonds is scheduled to go on trial next March on a similar charge.

The Cincinnati Reds have received permission from Commissioner Bud Selig to honor Rose, who has been banned from baseball since 1989, at Great American Ball Park next month on the 25th anniversary of his breaking Ty Cobb’s career record for hits. The event will mark the first time Rose will appear on the Reds’ home field since he was banned.

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News Item: DOPE HEAD FORESEES BASEBALL’S DOOM

Maybe that should be “head doper,” but John Fahey has said such dopey things “dope head” it shall be.

John Fahey is the chief of the World Anti-Doping Agency, the body of steroids zealots who have appointed themselves the all-powerful being of truth and justice in the matter of illegal performance-enhancing substances. No sports leaguer or organization is pure without WADA’s sanction.

Do you remember how when you were younger you saw gangster movies (Edward G. Robinson, George Raft), where the bad guys ran protection rackets, forcing businesses to pay for their protection or face having their stores torched?

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Major League Baseball has undergone such a huge change in club ownership in recent years that less than a handful of owners remain from what was perhaps the darkest days in the game’s history.

If you think I refer to the 1919 so-called Black Sox scandal, you would say of course the men who owned teams at that time no longer own teams, or anything else, for that matter. They are no longer with us.

But I’m talking about a more recent time, 1985 through 1987, the collusion era. That time, to me, was baseball’s darkest days, a time when not just one team cheated but when all of the teams cheated, not to mention the commissioner, Peter Ueberroth, and other baseball officials and all of their lawyers.

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