Steroids and more taints

UNTIL THIS week, Paxton Crawford was a name known only by the most hardened Red Sox fans, a pitcher with just 15 appearances with the Sox in 2000 and 2001. Then ESPN The Magazine published his admission of steroid use starting in 1999 and including his time with the Boston team. Asked by a Globe reporter in a follow-up interview if there were a lot of players using the banned substance then, Crawford said, ``Yup."

This is the first time a player has admitted using steroids while in a Boston uniform. His statements are a reminder of how irresponsible the owners and management of Major league Baseball and the players union were until recently in turning a blind eye toward use of performance-enhancement drugs. The extent of the problem has become evident mainly through criminal investigations, like the one in San Francisco that led to revelations about Giants slugger Barry Bonds and the recent admissions in federal court documents of journeyman pitcher Jason Grimsley that he had used steroids, human growth hormones, and amphetamines.

In March, commissioner Bud Selig realized that the sport had to go beyond its more aggressive testing and punishment policy to do its own investigation. Unwisely, Selig chose as the head of this inquiry former Senate majority leader George Mitchell. While Mitchell has an excellent reputation for probity, he also has two conflicts that should have led Selig to seek someone else. He is a director of the Red Sox (of which the New York Times Company, owner of the Globe, has a minority share) and chairman of the Walt Disney Company, which owns ESPN, a major baseball broadcaster. In addition, he is a friend of Selig, whose leadership should be part of the investigation.

Mitchell's investigators have begun to question team officials about use of barred substances. If the probers turn up little that is new, critics will attribute that, fairly or unfairly, to Mitchell's conflicts.

The steroid scandal now threatens to rank with the Black Sox gambling scandal as a shadow over the national pastime. Selig, the owners, and the union might have stopped it from reaching the scale it did in the late-1990s if baseball had not welcomed the explosion of home runs powered by the drugs as a way to lure back fans disillusioned by the strike of 1994. The sport's overdue effort now to find out just how deeply it was -- and still is -- affected by drugs would inspire more confidence if it were led by someone without Mitchell's ties to a baseball team and a baseball-broadcasting corporation.