I won’t mince words: the shit just got one step closer to hitting the fan. Today comes the news that the United States Congress plans to subpoena a handful of star players to testify about steroids in baseball. Furthermore, they plan to subpoena the results of steroid and other drug tests, with the likelihood that they’ll be entered into the public record, effectively outing players who were tested with a guarantee that those results would remain private. Ladies and gentlemen, here comes the witch hunt.

Not surprisingly, Major League Baseball plans to fight the subpoenas:

Stanley Brand, a lawyer for the baseball commissioner’s office, said the committee had no jurisdiction and was interfering with the federal grand jury by trying to force testimony from Giambi and others. He said the committee wanted to violate baseball’s first amendment privacy rights and was attempting to “satisfy their prurient interest into who may and may not have engaged in this activity.”

“The audacity, the legal audacity of subpoenaing someone who’s been a grand jury witness before there’s been a trial in the case in California is just an absolutely excessive and unprecedented misuse of congressional power,” Brand said.

“Not even the Iran-contra committee attempted to do that, and when it did, it tainted irreparably the prosecutions that came out of that investigation. Now if that’s what Congress wants to do to advance what it says is the public interest in combating a very serious problem that baseball has confronted, then in my judgment they’ve torn loose from their legislative moorings and they’re marauding in an area of the law that has very serious consequences for the judicial system.”

Note that this came from the commissioner’s office, not from the players’ union. If there’s one thing labor and management can agree on, it’s that they don’t need political grandstanding from the likes of John McCain and his Congressional cronies here.

Though I’m the first to admit that it’s not my favorite topic to write about, I’d love to have the time to sit down and spill one or two thousand harsh words on this today. Alas, my schedule prevents me from penning that particular column, so instead I’ll point you to Jayson Stark‘s piece at ESPN. I don’t usually find myself agreeing with much of what he writes, but he is spot on here:

It’s fine for talk-show hosts and talk-show callers to adopt that time-honored, un-American precept that men are guilty until proven innocent. Hey, that’s show biz.

But when the United States Congress stages an event in which guilty-until-proven-innocent will, essentially, be the central theme, it makes us a little uncomfortable.

…Not that any player who used steroids with an intention to cheat doesn’t deserve to be fried from coast to coast. But this is no way to find out who did and who didn’t.

By asking these questions, in this setting.

By subpoenaing steroid-test results that would violate the right to privacy of people who justly negotiated that right.

By acting as if any of this will “clean up” a sport that finally has a respectable banned-substance list which isn’t all that different from the lists of the other pro sports.

It is, after all, a little late to clean up whatever was going on in baseball in 1998, or 1993, or even in 2001.

Those yachts have all sailed. Whatever people used or didn’t use back then, no one is going to be able to jump into a time machine and stop it.

As I advised a couple of weeks ago, get out your hip waders. You’re going to need them, because this stuff is deep.

• • •

I’d like to offer my congratulations to a handful of my closest pals in this Internet baseball racket who have bonded together to form Baseball Toaster, a new site featuring many former All-Baseball.com writers and blogs. Alphabetically, they are:

• Bronx Banter — Alex Belth on the Yankees, now with 100% more Cliff Corcoran than before. My bruthas on the New York baseball scene.

• Catfish Stew — Ken Arneson on the A’s

• Cub Town — Alex Ciepley and Derek Smart

• Dodger Thoughts — Jon Weisman on the boys in blue

• Fairpole — homepage for the site’s software, designed by Arneson

• The Griddle– the site’s group blog

• Humbug — the poet laureate of baseball blogs, the Score Bard

• Mike’s Baseball Rants — Mike Carminati on the Phillies and whatever else strikes his fancy

• Post-Messenger — Will Carroll and his partner in web-racketry, Scott Long announced yesterday that they’ll now be delivering content for a small Indiana newspaper’s sports section called the Tri-County Post-Messenger, hence the name. Check Will’s take on the steroids-n-congress news. I should add parenthetically that Will’s got a forthcoming book (mid-April) on the topic of steroids called The Juice: the Real Story of Baseball’s Drug Problems, to which I’ve contributed a lengthy, data-driven chapter entitled “Do Steroids Rewrite the Record Books?” I’ll have plenty more to say about all of that soon.

These are my go-to guys, and I’m excited for all of them as they launch this new venture. Best of luck, dudes.