WASHINGTON -- Prompted by an upcoming book about Barry Bonds, a congressman who sponsored legislation calling for tougher drug testing in pro sports wrote a letter Wednesday asking baseball commissioner Bud Selig about his role in policing steroid use from 1998 to 2002.
"As commissioner, you have the essential responsibility to safeguard the integrity of the game and to ensure that cheaters have no place in professional baseball," Rep. Cliff Stearns said in the letter.
Stearns' House Energy and Commerce subcommittee held hearings last year about steroid use and he introduced the Drug Free Sports Act, one of several bills that would have made sports leagues give players lifetime bans for a second or third steroids offense.
Under pressure from Congress, baseball's players association agreed to toughen drug testing rules and penalties for 2005 and again this season.
"The Congress remains very concerned about the use of illegal, performance-enhancing drugs in sports at all levels and the effect that unpunished professional athletes who use such drugs will have on future generations," Stearns wrote to Selig.
"We have been encouraged by the tougher policy and penalties you re-negotiated with the MLBPA and will withhold judgment of their effectiveness until sufficient time has elapsed," he wrote.
Specifically, the Florida Republican asked Selig for information about a 2004 meeting with Bonds, baseball's policy for addressing alleged steroid use if a player doesn't fail a drug test and what Selig's authority is to investigate alleged steroid use.
Bonds, who broke Mark McGwire's single-season home run record in 2001 and is approaching Babe Ruth's career total, is accused in an upcoming book of using steroids, human growth hormone and insulin for at least five seasons beginning in 1998. Baseball did not ban performance-enhancing substances until after the 2002 season.
Last week, Selig wouldn't commit to investigating. He said baseball will await publication of the book, "Game of Shadows," which is due out March 23 and then decide how to proceed.
The New York Daily News, however, reported Thursday that Selig has already decided to begin an investigation, according to an unidentified baseball official. The newspaper said Selig is expected to announce the decision next week, but hadn't yet decided if the investigation will be done by Major League Baseball
officials or outside investigators.