Baseball's steroid era

IN THE ANNALS of baseball, Commissioner Bud Selig and the players union will live in infamy for not collaborating in an effort to ban steroids from the sport when rumors of their use became common in the 1990s. In recent years, Selig has responded to public and congressional criticism of steroids' corruption of baseball by instituting testing and penalties for their use. On Thursday, he was in response mode again, reacting to an authoritative new book by appointing former Senate Majority Leader George Mitchell to do a thorough investigation of players' use of these performance-enhancing drugs.

Such an investigation could serve a useful purpose in pursuing the allegations in ''Game of Shadows," whose authors provide evidence that steroids were used by Barry Bonds, the San Francisco Giants slugger who could this season surpass Babe Ruth and Henry Aaron as baseball's greatest homerun hitter. The charges match the Black Sox World Series gambling scandal of 1919 in casting doubt on the integrity of the game and the records accumulated by players.

Unfortunately, Selig has erred in picking Mitchell to lead the inquiry. Although he is an accomplished lawyer, politician, and diplomat, Mitchell is both on the board of the Boston Red Sox and chairman of the Walt Disney Company, which owns ESPN.

The conflict because of his position with the Red Sox (of which the New York Times Company, owner of the Globe, has a minority share) is serious enough. His position with Disney and the almost $2 million in Disney stock he owns should be disqualifying. Not only does ESPN have a broadcast contract with baseball, but on Tuesday ESPN2 will start airing a 10-hour reality series starring Bonds himself.

Mitchell has enough integrity not to steer the investigation away from Bonds or Red Sox players (or toward players on opposing teams). But the public has no way of being certain of that. Appearances do count, especially when the purpose of the inquiry is to clarify the appearance that Selig, the team owners, and the players union all agreed to wink at steroid use in the 1990s as the league tried to bring fans back to stadiums after the strike-shortened 1994 season.

Properly done, the investigation could, as former Commissioner Fay Vincent said, ''set the record straight," whether or not it leads to any punishments of players. But for the inquiry to succeed, it should at least have a skipper who loves the sport and has no ties to any of its teams or its broadcast partners. Mitchell doesn't fit the bill.