MESA, Ariz. -- The most reliable fans in America migrate here every spring, supporters of a team celebrating a complete century of failure. They bask in the informality of training camp, savoring a conversation or two with the men wearing the uniform of the Chicago Cubs.
Derrek Lee, the Cubs' All-Star first baseman, hears from the fans about last year's playoff flop, this year's chances, how to pronounce the last name of Japanese outfielder Kosuke Fukudome.
And steroids?
"Not one thing," Lee said. "Not one word."
The winter was a rocky one for baseball. Barry Bonds appeared in court and Roger Clemens in Congress, with perhaps the best hitter and best pitcher of this generation facing allegations of lying under oath by denying steroid use.
The Mitchell Report put faces on baseball's steroid era, almost 100 faces, blaming players and owners alike for the widespread abuse of performance-enhancing substances.
As winter turned to spring, however, fans appeared to have left any cares behind. Cubs coach Alan Trammell, the former six-time All-Star shortstop for the Detroit Tigers, says fans who chat him up talk about everything but steroids.
"I hate to say it's a nonissue," Trammell said, "but at this point, to me, it is. I haven't had one conversation with a fan about it."
Is the steroid era finally over?
Commissioner Bud Selig would love nothing more than to answer with a definitive yes, but he declined to go that far.
"I'm proud of where baseball is," Selig said. "We've got the toughest testing program in American sports. We've banned amphetamines. We're funding [research into] an HGH test. We're engaged in a lot of public relations stuff," he said, citing partnerships with antidrug initiatives.
"We've made enormous progress," he continued. "That's what our fans think too. That's why we've had the support we've had, and we'll do even better this year. They know we've done something about it."
The Mitchell Report cautioned that baseball's drug testing program, entering its fifth season, "appears to have reduced the use of detectable steroids but by itself has not removed the cloud of suspicion over the game."
The report noted that human growth hormone has become the drug of choice "precisely because it is not detectable." The report also cited recent federal investigations into drug trafficking that linked players to use of performance-enhancing substances, including steroids and HGH.
"This problem continues, years after mandatory random testing began," the report said.
Dr. Gary Wadler, an advisor to the World Anti-Doping Agency, said fans would have to have "tremendous naivete" to believe baseball's steroid era is over.
"I don't think the spigot has been shut down," Wadler said. "I think it has been slowed down."
Wadler said a new generation of steroids comes in creams, patches and gels, with detectable traces remaining in the body for days and weeks rather than months. With baseball's drug policy calling for a total of 60 off-season tests among 1,200 players, Wadler said players might well take those odds, and the new drugs.
"You can play the calendar much more easily," he said.
The sport administers drug tests via urine analysis. Dr. Don Catlin, the Los Angeles scientist funded by baseball to research a urine-based HGH test, says its development is years away, at best.
Selig and players union chief Donald Fehr have resisted blood testing, although prominent players such as Derek Jeter and Jeff Kent have supported it.
With blood tests for HGH expected to be commercially available later this year, and with the possibility that designer steroids yet to be invented might best be detected in blood rather than urine, Angels owner Arte Moreno hesitated to declare the steroid era over.
"I don't know if you could say it's completely over," Moreno said. "We have to go through -- I don't know if this is the right word -- a cleansing process. You don't have blood testing, so it's not 100%."
Moreno said he believes the use of performance-enhancing substances has declined dramatically, because of lengthier suspensions for offenders -- even without a positive test, if a player is tripped up in a drug sting -- as well as the stigma attached to publicly identified users.
"I would think the players understand it's not worth it," Moreno said.
If fans wished to complain to anyone in baseball about the steroid era, Moreno might offer a particularly sympathetic ear. He essentially threatened to banish Gary Matthews Jr. from the team last year if the outfielder did not issue a statement addressing allegations he ordered HGH.
But Moreno, so accessible that he sits in the front row at the Angels' spring home in Tempe, Ariz., said fans talk with him about anything but steroids.
"I don't think it's so much that they don't care as that they recognize a few players abused it," Moreno said. "They're more interested in who's playing and how they're playing."
