When, sometime ago, I was doing research for a story on baseball in the early 20th century, I was surprised to discover how much suspicion there existed that some games were being fixed -- regularly, year after year. Yet despite all the inside knowledge, nothing much was ever done, and, in the end, scoundrels did fix a World Series.

It's time for Donald Fehr to address the steroid issue. Andy Lyon/Getty Images

It all seems so much the case with peformance-enhancing drugs a hundred years later. When it came to fixing games, everybody was sure something was up, but out of some misguided loyalty to the group, the clean players didn't protest, and the public just turned its head. Maybe this country is more programmed to accept cheating in professional sports because we grow up blithely tolerating such utter corruption and hypocrisy in the college athletics we love.

Track and field people, who have taken such a tremendous beating on the subject of drugs, simply could not comprehend the appalling double standard that has allowed Major League Baseball to operate under restricted-substance laws that are different from the strictures that came to exist in virtually every other respectable athletic institution -- including, by the way, minor league baseball.

The players' union, of course, bears the greatest burden of guilt. Don Fehr and Gene Orza, the leaders, somehow decided that it was better to protect steroid users than it was to stand up for the rights of the honest players. Incredibly, even last week, Orza publicly declared that steroids were no worse than cigarettes and then babbled on about how some people abuse aspirin, so  ... oh, you try to make sense of the baseball union and its lax attitude toward performance-enhancing drugs.

Once again, we can only cue Lord Acton ... "Power tends to corrupt, etc." The baseball union took control of the game because management behaved like the Sun King. But now we see that as the union took the place of management, it soon acted in the same unbridled way. What irony -- the union saved players from management. Now, pray, who will save the players from their own union?

Certainly, a serious drug-testing program should be put in effect. Commissioner Bud Selig ought to be publicly screaming for the union to accept changes in the sport's drug statutes, which are now an insult to law, to health and to baseball. Instead, all he's done is institute a gag order, so that nobody in baseball will talk about what everybody is talking about in baseball.

It's too early to tell how much damage has been done to the game. There is even the contrarian's opinion that fans have become so enthralled by home runs that if the heat scares players off steroids, home run production will go down, and so will baseball's popularity. Indisputably, though, something precious has already been lost -- some faith, some trust, and what little innocence remained after all the turmoil of strikes and lockouts. Maybe this drug issue is even worse to deal with because we'll never really know -- will we? -- about who-took-what during the past few years.

Most Americans, most baseball fans, adhere firmly to the principle that a man is innocent until proven guilty. But outside jurisprudence, most baseball fans also can't help but believe that if looks like a duck on steroids, and it's built like a duck on steroids and it slugs like a duck on steroids, well then, it's a duck on steroids. So the sad reality is that, in their hearts, many fans already have concluded that the man who really and truly holds the single-season home run record is Roger Maris, New York Yankees, 1961, 61 homers -- clean and undisputed.

Sports Illustrated senior contributing writer Frank Deford is a regular contributor to SI.com and appears each Wednesday on National Public Radio's Morning Edition. He is a longtime correspondent for HBO's Real Sports and his new novel, An American Summer (Sourcebooks Trade), is available at bookstores everywhere.