Make 'em take lie detector tests

I wrote this almost three years ago, but it's just as relevant today. Especially in light of the Alex Rodriguez admission of steroid use.

Want to know who's using? Hook 'em all up to a polygraph.
Want to know who's lying? Strap 'em all to a lie detector.
If Major League Baseball wants to clean up its act, there's a way. It might be flawed, but even the result of a scientifically debatable polygraph is better than having to take these guys at their word ever again.
If the notoriously overprotective players union wants to clear the collective name of its constituency, it will voluntarily waive the players' right to hide behind the Employee Polygraph Protection Act of 1988, which states (in part):
"An employer engaged in commerce ... cannot, in any manner or for any reason, have an employee or prospective employee submit to a polygraph test."
Give up that right, and make a show of it. Bring everything into the light. Right now.
Do it before any more IRS investigators break down the door of [name redacted] or that other suspected steroid/HGH user, [name redacted].
Want the scandal to go away? Forget about financing a virtually hopeless study at UCLA in a quest for a urine test that reliably detects human growth hormone (a substance that is extremely difficult to detect even in a blood test).
Work out a deal with the American Polygraph Association - whose business is truth, a strong dose of which baseball could use - and set up an independent board to administer, monitor and analyze the results.
Do it every year, to major-leaguers and to minor-leaguers. Make it a standard part of reporting to spring training, an annual ritual, like the preseason physical or daily pitchers fielding practice.
Pop the polygraph on 'em at random times during the season. Keep 'em on their toes.
Make every result public. Players who admit during the test to having used performance-enhancing substances should receive reduced penalties, an acknowledgment that for once, they told the truth.
Players who lie about it should be fined, suspended and prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.
They have done this to themselves. Jason Grimsley has done it to himself. But it's not only Grimsley, or the six names redacted from the now-infamous affidavit that brought to light the most celebrated IRS investigation this side of Al Capone.
It's Grimsley, it's the six blacked-out names he named, it's every name of every player of every organization for the past 15 years - and maybe before. That includes this year, Year Two of MLB's supposedly tough-as-nails but really soft-as-cotton policy governing the use of performance enhancers.
They're all under the same blanket now, the blanket of suspicion. No one is above it.
Is that fair?
Not to the players who have spent their careers legally squeezing every ounce of ability out of their unenhanced bodies and minds. Fair or not, it is what the current culture of baseball dictates.
Speculation. Whispers. Suspicion.
Who now can watch a pitcher throw 98 mph and not wonder? Who now can watch a batter slug a baseball 450 feet and not suspect?
Want to know for sure? Read the printout after the polygraph. Those jagged lines don't lie.
Not that it will ever happen. For one thing, as reliable as polygraphs are, there always is that element of uncertainty - just as there are Web sites selling synthetic HGH, there are Web sites out there that teach you how to beat a lie detector.
Besides, union leader Don Fehr fought tooth and nail against steroid testing, on the grounds that testing "without cause" would violate the players' civil rights. To think that he would submit to a solution as admittedly drastic as across-the-board lie detector tests is ludicrous.
Nor would Commissioner Bud Selig ever stoop to such draconian methods.
So, what? Believe [name redacted] when he says he's clean? Take it on faith that the same players who pass the toothless MLB drug test aren't using something else?
That's hard to do now. And maybe it always will be.