Frank DeFord’s column this week:
Crime and (sort of) punishment Baseball could learn a lot from cyclist Tyler Hamilton Posted: Thursday August 11, 2005 2:49PM; Updated: Friday August 12, 2005 12:58AM 
Unlike how baseball has treated Rafael Palmeiro, cycling has forced Tyler Hamilton to sit while he appeals his suspension. Alexander Hassenstein/Bongarts/Getty Images 
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Something is terribly out of whack here. Tyler Hamilton, an American cyclist, tested positive for blood doping last year. Even as he appeals, he is in the process of serving a two-year suspension. Rafael Palmeiro tested positive for steroids and endured a suspension of 10 days. The disparity in the penalties is simply ludicrous. Either the Olympic judgment, as meted out by the World Anti-Doping Agency, is too severe … or baseball law is a joke.
To be sure, Palmeiro has been disgraced, and in light of his sworn testimony before Congress, he’s been exposed as a liar as well as a cheat. He also may have lost his chance to be voted into the Hall Of Fame. But justice is not supposed to be about peripheral castigation. Do the crime, do the time. Ten days for an offense of this nature is asinine. Pete Rose was banished from the game for transgressions that were nowhere near as damaging to baseball.
The fact is that the players’ union has its integrity on the line. If it does not go along with Commissioner Bud Selig and dramatically stiffen doping penalties, then it reveals itself not to be a support force for its honest members, but an enabling agency for its culprits.
As a point of passing interest, it’s worth noting that Hamilton, the cyclist, actually has a good case for acquittal. Circumstantially, he looks so guilty he could also be fairly charged with killing Cock Robin. Blood doping means transfusing extra blood or blood products into your body. More red cells, more endurance. And Hamilton came up positive in a new test for blood doping after winning a gold medal at the Olympics last year. Then, only a few weeks later, Hamilton tested positive again at a race in Spain.
But here’s the rub. While the tests clearly showed that Hamilton had two different blood populations in his system, it can’t prove how the second blood got there.
But if not by transfusion, then how?
Well, some esteemed doctors claim that as much as 50 percent – maybe even all – of us are chimeric. That means that we have traces of other blood in our systems that have been there since the womb. This second blood either comes from the mother or from what is known as a “vanishing twin” – that is: a second embryo that was conceived but failed to develop.
If all that sounds like something out of a Stephen King novel – and, indeed, the anti-doping people hoot at it – Hamilton owns serious medical support for his appeal, which comes up in September.
Unfortunately for Palmeiro, he can’t claim that it was his evil vanishing twin who took the steroids. He’s just very lucky that his sentence is only 1.4 percent what Hamilton – or any Olympic athlete – must serve for the same first offense.
Too much of our discussion about baseball’s drug users is devoted to the past. Can we excise the records of those who are so transparently guilty of steroid use? Can we bestow asterisks? Can we undo those things that ought not to have been done? No, we can’t. We can’t re-write history. Get over it.
Instead, what we can do is deal with the present and the future, and the prime thing on that agenda is to force the baseball union to own up to its responsibilities and properly punish the bad guys.
T