By Bob Markus

Just when you thought it was safe to go back to the ball park, along comes A-Rod, dropping an A-bomb, live, on your television screen. You might as well surrender, unconditionally, baseball fans, because it is now apparent that an entire generation of the best and brightest the sport has to offer is and has been playing under a cloud.

We've hardly gotten used to the idea that Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens, arguably the best hitter and pitcher, respectively, of their time, if not all time, have given new meaning to the term "a shot and a beer," and now we learn that Alex Rodriguez, the greatest star of the next generation, also has used so-called performance enhancing drugs.

While Bonds and Clemens have followed the time-honored advice of cheating husbands--deny, deny, deny--Rodriguez has fessed up, in hopes that a forgiving public will take him back in its embrace after the revelation that he was one of 104 major league players whose specimens were red-flagged when baseball conducted its first drug test back in 2003.

Results of that test were supposed to be confidential, but in this era of camera phones and bloggers it's no secret that there is no secret that can be kept much longer than it takes for another giant corporation to file for bankruptcy. Somewhere, 103 baseball players are having trouble sleeping at night. Over this last week-end, A-Rod was outed by Sports Illustrated, through its website, and, after examining his options, apparently decided that the truth might set him free.

The New York Yankees' super star voluntarily sat for a lenghty interview with ESPN's Peter Gammons, a former newspaper guy who knows how to ask the right questions. But, although Rodriguez admitted taking steroids during a three-year period from 2001-2003, he was not entirely forthcoming. Gammons made several attempts to find out what was A-Rod's drug of choice, but the celebrated slugger kept fouling off good pitches. Like a politician responding to a question about his specific plans for ensuring world peace, Rodriguez kept insisting that it was "a different culture in those days," as if in 2003--six years ago--women were wearing hoop skirts and schoolboys were wearing knickers.

By the time Rodriguez, who had just jumped ship from Seattle to the Texas Rangers, began dabbling in steroids, the drug culture apparently was in full swing. During his exciting mano-a-mano with the Chicago Cubs' Sammy Sosa in pursuit of Roger Maris' single season home run record, St. Louis Cardinals' slugger Mark McGwire made no attempt to hide bottles of a drug that, although not banned by baseball at the time, was considered performance enhancing. I'm not certain just how performance enhancing steroids are. They may make you bigger and stronger, but to hit a home run you've still got to put a solid stroke on a ball thrown at up to 100 m.p.h. by a guy who himself could be on steroids.

Sosa himself never was caught using banned drugs, although he was caught using a corked bat and perhaps the latter is one reason few people believe him when he says he never did illegal drugs. Once a cheat, always a cheat. Rodriguez told Gammons that he had an epiphany before the 2004 season when he began to see that continued use of illegal drugs might impact not only his career, but his post career legacy.

Because whatever drugs he was taking were not banned by baseball at the time, Rodriguez is not likely to be punished by major league baseball. But he is right to worry about life after baseball. He probably will retire as baseball's all-time home run leader. At age 34, he needs 209 more to tie Bonds' record of 762. But consider McGwire, who otherwise would have been a cinch to get into the Baseball Hall of Fame on the first ballot. He hasn't come close in his first three years on the ballot. It appears he will never make it. Nor will Sosa.

It will be interesting to see how the Hall of Fame voters react to Bonds and Clemens when they come up for enshrinement. As a voter myself, I'm interested in seeing how I'll react. How can you keep the all-time home run leader out of the Hall of Fame? The same way you can keep baseball's all-time hits leader, Pete Rose, out of the Hall of Fame. Rose, of course, has been ruled ineligible because of his admission of gambling on Cincinnati Reds games--betting only on his team to win--while he was manager of the Reds. His name has never been on the ballot. Perhaps the solution is as simple as that. It's baseball's problem; let baseball solve it. If a player's name is on the ballot, a voter should consider what the player did on the field and vote accordingly. In fact, hang in there, Mark McGwire. I think you just picked up another Hall of Fame vote.