It's more than a solid team; it's the stuff of Murderers Row. Barry Bonds, Gary Sheffield, Jose Canseco, and Troy Glaus provide the power. Roger Clemens anchors a decent starting rotation. Eric Gagne puts the lights out on the back end.

Great team. Do you want them with or without the juice?

This week's disclosure of 85 current and former players in former Senator George Mitchell's report on performance-enhancing drugs in the sport definitely will turn some heads. It is already making fans look again at record that were broken in the past decade.

And already, the spin is starting. Clemens has categorically denied any involvement whatsoever, while his old buddy Andy Petitte, a finesse pitcher, admitted to using human growth hormone (HGH) while recovering from an elbow injury.

The lords of the Grand Old Game will certainly look at how things are run, and the game may even reinvent itself to a degree.

Again.

Of the 85 listed as having links to performance-enhancing drugs, seven are former Most Valuable Players. This bunch accounts for 31 All-Star players. Off the straight numbers, Bonds and Clemens are sure hits for first-ballot enshrinement in baseball's Hall Of Fame, and a few others - Mark McGwire, Rafael Palmeiro, Petitte, Sheffield, Matt Williams -- have careers with the kind of stats Cooperstown usually welcomes.

Juiced or not, George Mitchell's team can beat anyone's. Even - heresy of heresies - the 1927 New York Yankees. Of course, back then the performance-enhancing drug of choice was Wheaties, though with Babe Ruth as the centerpiece to that team, add hot dogs and Bourbon.

Now, steroids and human-growth hormones are supposed to increase muscle mass, knock out signs of fatigue, or allow a player to recover more quickly from injuries. Basically they're power drugs, as baseball is a power game.

After baseball's last flirtation with self-destruction - the 1994 player strike which wiped out the World Series - the game needed something extraordinary to bring its credibility and fans back. Within a few years, McGwire and Sammy Sosa did just that, locking into the best home run race since Mantle and Maris. Their achievements made the game fun again, just as surely as the Babe's gigantic swing helped ease memories of the 1919 World Series betting scandal in which eight players were implicated. A good solid home run to the cheap seats always does that; makes the problems seem to go away.

McGwire and Sosa, though, were named prime steroids suspects. And while McGwire took the Fifth in a Senate hearing a few years ago, thereby blowing his chance of a first-ballot election to the Hall. However, neither he nor Sosa were accused of anything in the Mitchell report.

Back in the late 1970s and early 1980s, players suddenly started getting bigger and stronger, ushering a whole new generation to the sport. A skinny catcher named Brian Downing got muscles somewhere along the line, and built a solid career. His teammate Nolan Ryan, who broke in as a 150-pound pitcher with a world-class fastball, suddenly developed legs like tree trunks. I think Ryan weighed close to 230 pounds by his mid-40s, when he still could throw serious heat. Most of the weight gain was in his legs.

If you're looking for a scandal here, forget it. The only culprit to be found was in weight training - Downing discovered Nautilus equipment and Ryan started peeling off mile after mile on a stationary bicycle. Already, baseball was unrecognizable from its Wheaties-and-Bourbon days.

Like it or not, performance-enhancing drugs are fed by the game's thirst for power performances, and are probably a part of the training evolution. As baseball salaries, fans and team officials expect their favorite player to be out there, in fine form. If Joe Shlabotnik, with his mega-million paycheck, is sitting on the pine shaking off his latest injury, a lot of fans will feel screwed out of their ticket prices.

I remember in 1970 when Willie Mays made baseball's highest salary at around $135,000 per year - about what Alex Rodriguez makes per what? Practice swing coming out of the dugout? I'm not going to begrudge these athletes their gigantic paychecks (shows that somebody is and was sure making money out of baseball) but with increased benefits, increased pressure to perform always follows. It's like that in any business. I don't care if you sack groceries for a living, if you get a pay raise the boss man's always going to expect just a little bit more in return. The only difference here is the number of zeroes on the paycheck.

I sure don't condone using performance-enhancing drugs in sports, and to me a lot of great performance will always have the whiff of suspicion about them. But where do you draw the line? Are weight-rooms cheating? Do career-saving arm injuries have lasting effects on the player - or, will Tommy John's rebuilt pitching arm fall off when he's 80? What was in those hot dogs the Babe reportedly scarfed down, a dozen at a time?

Eventually this performance-enhancing mess will shake out and make sense. Just in time for baseball's next scandal.