Roid rage

Usually when there's a story about steroids, I get mad at the player for doing drugs and at baseball for doing nothing about it. Last night, when the maddening story of J.C. Romero broke, I wasn't mad at the player, but at baseball for not doing nothing about it.

Sure it's possible that Romero, who got in front of the story and explained himself to Phil Sheridan, is sugarcoating his version. And now the players' association may be disputing part of his account. Romero's story: He took a supplement he was told was safe, but then failed a drug test after learning the supplement contained a banned substance. Great, there's a 50-game lesson learned for J.C. and the Phillies.

Give him credit for sticking to his guns and not accepting a halved penalty for playing along with Major League Baseball:

"If people are intimidated because Major League [Baseball] is a big organization, so be it," Romero said. "But they are not going to make an example of me thinking that I'm just a [dumb] Puerto Rican. It's not going to happen. It's not the way I'm built.

"For me to keep my mouth shut? That's not the right thing to do. If they want to bump me out of the game, so be it. What am I going to do, just sit back and take it? When I know in my heart I'm innocent? That doesn't fly well with me and it doesn't fly well in my house, either."

Since he brought up ethnicity, there's another point to this story. Early on in baseball's steroid testing, there was a complaint that a predominant number of Latin players were caught because they couldn't understand the policy. Well, here's a Latin player who has no language issue and did everything you would want a player to do, but he still winds up penalized.

This is a bad day for baseball.

Yankees farmhand Sergio Mitre was snared in similar circumstance. Normally I'd say he probably deserved it, but these facts are too disturbing even for Yankee jokes.

Also disturbing were comments by Ruben Amaro - he stood by the team's trainer and baseball, but not Romero - and the players' union, which said baseball should address these problems in the future. Yup, somehow this is the one case in which the union isn't going to try to run baseball.

Notes: Marcus Giles, who has also faced whispers of steroid use, just joined the Phillies as infield insurance. ... Comcast SportsNet reported last night that the Phillies did offer Pat Burrell a two-year contract during the season for more money than he got from Tampa Bay. So I take back a little of my organization-bashing: Pat, we're in bad economic times. You should have taken the money and run. There's not that big of a market for a slow-footed, .250-hitting left fielder, regardless of his bulldog.