By John Klima
Staff Writer

It was at the winter meetings in New Orleans in 2003 when Dusty Baker mentioned something I never forgot. He didn’t say it in front of a crowd, and there was a hint of sadness in his voice, as though players were ignoring something that he felt could help them survive.

“I wish players would pay attention to the history of the game,” Baker said. “I wish they would understand who came before them and what went on.”

Had the players learned to watch for the signs, they would have seen what is coming now, the steroid scandal that is working to completion, the Human Growth Hormone wars that will soon signify that baseball will purge itself of this era by purging players.

If this language is harsh, it is because it is accurate. This is a basic rule of baseball - somebody has to take the bullet. After the 1919 World Series, it was the players. So too will it be in 2007. In time of scandal, it is not the league nor the club nor the media or fans that will pay the most. It is the players, in money, in dignity and in legacy.

The leaks to the national media, mostly in New York, are troubling, and one has to wonder where they are coming from. If we’re talking about as many as 45 players, that’s at least one from each team, because not every club has players buried under expensive multi-year contracts. Could it be that some clubs are picking and choosing who they want to expose, which players and contracts they want to be rid off, which players whose off-the-field behavior they have grown tired of?

This could be the culmination of the era, resolved the way all baseball feuds inevitably are, with blood. This is a vindictive old battle, players vs. clubs, MLB vs. union, and one of the few occasions when baseball can strong arm all of the clubs to a point where it is beneficial for them to stand up, as owners did when they hired Judge Landis, to hide business, money, and power under the mask of morality.

Suddenly, the HGH wars are a new way for clubs to get even with players who have disappointed them and to look like they are taking the moral high road. Clubs will do anything if they get a taste of money, especially if it is money that they have already spent and fear they have lost. A player embarrassing himself is one thing. Humiliating his owner with fervent denials is another.

Suddenly, a player who is publicly painted as a moral disgrace becomes expendable. Not even a productive player can be considered safe right now. Can you say it’s entirely a coincidence when players mentioned suddenly go into hiding on the disabled list?

The wording of contracts is also going to come into play. In 1920, Joe Jackson signed a three-year contract with the White Sox for $8,000 a year. After Judge Landis suspended the players, thus voiding Jackson’s contract, Jackson sued the White Sox in 1924 for the remaining two years of his contract, contending that the White Sox signed him after he and the other seven players had been found innocent of conspiracy charges.

Author Gene Carney noted in his book, “Burying the Black Sox,” that Jackson contended that the White Sox never told him that they had included the standard 10-day clause in his contract, a version of which exists today, allowing clubs to terminate a contract within 10 days for behavior detrimental to a club, such as drugs.

The case went to trial and a jury sided with Jackson, 11-1, but as Carney detailed, White Sox lawyers miraculously procured Jackson’s Grand Jury testimony that had vanished in 1920, which did not agree with his later account. The judge threw the case out. The law sided with the baseball establishment and overruled the people. Jackson settled out of court and never played again.

But this sequence is playing again. Performance-enhancing drugs were accepted behavior, like gambling before it, a collective crime accepted and embraced, even when some writers and officials called for it to stop. The players should have solved this behind closed doors, instead of cowering behind their powerful union. Don’t cry wolf with blood on your lips.

As the Black Sox Grand Jury testimony was leaked, so too are information leaks springing up as players come into the line of fire.

“The people who leaked the Grand Jury testimony thought they were doing baseball a favor,” Carney said. “They thought they were doing a public service.”

Perhaps in time we will learn where these leaks are coming from. But that time will be years from now.

Gambling ended when it became more valuable to have it out of the game than to have it in the game. So too will it be with HGH. Paint enough villains and a cause is created. Create a cause and you have your way. It’s like climbing the ladder against a hitter, burying him with high-and-tight fastballs, each one more dangerous than the last.

Bud Selig brought George Mitchell into this to clear his name as much as to cleanse the game. Like many veteran baseball men, he is keenly aware of his place in history, and wants to polish the plaque before he’s got one. He is exonerating himself. Bud is willing to take his bullet – but unlike some of the players – he’s going to be standing when it’s over.

The chances are better that players who are in the declining years of their productivity will be singled out, but don’t rule out younger players.

Carney wonders why, for example, Barry Bonds has been viewed differently than Roger Clemens has not.

“I don’t know,” Carney said. “It does seem selective, though.”

Baseball runs its scandals the way it runs its marketing campaigns, with poster boys, working under the belief that the public wants to a see a face with the problem, and that players are too stupid to comprehend otherwise. It’s another basic rule of a baseball life. If something can’t help you, it can only hurt you.

Selective is a good phrase for this. Witch hunt is another. The spin will be morality but the truth will be as menacing as a purpose pitch after the last warning. The players are all alone in the box here, and if their union caves into blood testing for HGH next year, wedged between the baseball establishment, the federal government and public opinion, then Major League Baseball will have won.

The players have grown wide and complacent over the years, the protection of their union as firm as a witness protection program. The union is too powerful to allow for players to be banned for life – as the Sox were – but not powerful enough to protect all of them from being railroaded.

Baker was more right than he knew.

The players should have learned their history, because in times of scandal, it’s not the front offices or the league and the clubs, not the media, and not the fans that pay. It is the boys on the field, whose invisibility has been lifted, who will be summarily singled out and pushed away like the Black Sox before them.