Mike Trout's anti-steroid stand dissipates quickly

Yesterday on Philly Sports Talk, Michael Barkann suggested/hoped that Mike Trout's hard-line remarks about steroid punishment might trigger a movement among players to police their own game. Michael is a good and ethical man and, despite what he has seen in his decades of sports coverage, he would like all his sports stars to be that way, too.

John Gonzalez and I? We were just a little bit cynical.

Trout's comments triggered a movement all right. Before the New York media could follow up on the comments Trout made on WFAN radio that afternoon, Angels player representative C.J. Wilson apparently moved towards the second-year star from Millville, N.J. and convinced him that continuing this line of discussion would win him few new friends and even fewer allies among his peers.

``You have to talk to C.J.,'' Trout said when the clubhouse doors opened. "I'm not going to talk about it anymore."

And so ended the movement.

Before he mummed up, Trout spoke passionately about the toxic effect of baseball's various steroid scandals, most recently the Biogenesis bust that exposed Ryan Braun as a cheater, and re-nabbed Yankees veteran Alex Rodriguez, who was in the Yankees lineup for the sixth time since appealing his 211-game suspension.

"To me, personally, I think you should be out of the game if you get caught," Trout told WFAN. "It takes away from the guys that are working hard every day and doing it all natural.

"Some people just are trying to find that extra edge," Trout told the radio station. "It's tough as a guy that goes out there and plays hard every day, puts in 110% effort. To wake up, see there's a list of guys. … It's good that MLB caught them, and they're moving in the right direction with suspensions and stuff."

Problem is, they've been moving in this right direction for more than a decade now, and the hits just keep coming. Why? Because steroid use and steroid testing continues to be a game of espionage, the cheaters figuring out loopholes, the testers seeking to close them. It is why when athletes on the international stage do get caught, the penalties are far more severe than in baseball and other professional sports.

It's not just the Player's Union. The Brewers made a lot of personnel decisions based around Ryan Braun's youth a productivity. Do you think they want to see him go away forever?

As for their peers scorn? Consider that Andy Pettite is still a popular Yankee, David Ortiz is an icon in Boston and Mark McGwire is on his second job as a Major League hitting coach, and may one day manage a ballclub.

I don't think there's an easy solution at all," Wilson said later in the Angels dugout. But in the next instant he said, "We've had less and less cheating with harsher penalties.''

That would seem to be an easy solution then, no?

No, C.J. said. ``There are reasons we have rules. Speeding tickets don't result in the death penalty.''

Hard to argue with that logic. I wouldn't even know how to begin.