Faced with a co-operating witness still playing in the major leagues, the agents wanted more than mere names though.

They asked Grimsley to wear a wire in order to help them gather evidence against his contemporaries. After he refused to go along with that plan and eventually hired a lawyer, the agents returned to his home in early June. Carrying a search warrant, they smashed the front door down and trawled the house, warning it was about time he offered up more. When he didn't, his earlier sworn affidavit was released to the media with the names of all other players blacked out.

Within hours, baseball was abuzz with speculation about the identity of those Grimsley had fingered and the player himself requested his release from the Diamondbacks, immediately walking away from the sport. In the ongoing drama that is steroids and baseball, the significance of this chapter is that unlike most previous offenders, Grimsley is neither a superstar nor a big hitter. That somebody regarded as a journeyman pitcher throughout a career that included a stint as a bit-part player with the New York Yankees could be so enmeshed in the drug culture acutely demonstrates how deep the problem afflicting the game is.

"You're better off not saying anything because it's unfair to the guys unless you have specific proof, " said David Segui, a former teammate of Grimsley's with the Baltimore Orioles and one of those named in the affidavit. "I honestly don't think he knows who was doing what. I believe this whole thing has been blown out of proportion. The people that take this stuff, you just don't walk around the clubhouse telling people about it. To me, if you get caught, you should just say, 'My fault, ' and take your spanking. Don't start accusing others of things you don't know. But I don't blame Jason. He was under pressure. And everyone responds differently under pressure."

Now retired, Segui claimed his use of HGH was by medical prescription but more cogently still, he admitted members of the Orioles' management had full knowledge of what he was doing and thought nothing of it. Just another indication of how performance-enhancing substances have been an accepted part of baseball's fabric rather than a stain on it. In this regard, Grimsley also testified that up until this season, most teams had two separate pots of coffee, leaded and unleaded, in their locker-rooms.

Leaded contained amphetamines, once the preferred stimulant of Nazi stormtroopers, mixed in. Unleaded had just regular coffee.

"I was disappointed and angered by revelations that a Major League player had acknowledged using Human Growth Hormone and had said that others were using HGH as well, " wrote baseball commissioner Bud Selig in an open letter to several major newspapers. "Seven hundred and fifty great athletes play Major League Baseball.

The overwhelming majority are hard-working, honorable individuals who play to win the right way.

"But among the 750, there have been and still are those who would cheat the game to gain an advantage. They hurt not only themselves, but they unfairly raise questions about the integrity of their teammates who play by the rules and they violate the trust placed in them by you, the fans. These players who use performing-enhancing substances offend all of us who care for the game and I will not tolerate their actions."

Although Selig declared baseball would invest in finding a reliable test to prove HGH use, this was a risible response really. Selig is the commissioner who presided over the most sordid decade in baseball history, an era during which the game was a steroid-fuelled distortion. While every other professional sport has been fighting the war on drugs since the late '80s, baseball didn't even start random-testing and properly penalising offenders until 2004. Indeed, amphetamines were only declared off-limits this past winter, a couple of decades after the Olympics banned them.

As the Grimsley story dominated the headlines, Senator George Mitchell of Northern Ireland peace process fame was having trouble conducting his independent investigation into the Barry Bonds affair. Grimsley may have sung for the FBI but Mitchell has found it difficult to get employees of clubs to even agree to be interviewed by him. In order to circumvent the unofficial omerta that governs the game, he had to request MLB to order people to talk under threat of being suspended from the sport. At the same time, his attempts to access the medical records of suspected steroid users have been stymied by the all-powerful players' union, MLBPA.

With many fearing Mitchell lacks the legal power to achieve anything, the best hope of cleaning up the sport may come through a man called Jeff Novitzky. A sixfoot-seven shaven-headed accountant, he's the Inland Revenue Service agent who exposed the BALCO scandal in 2003 and brought the FBI to Grimsley's house in April. The future credibility of the national pastime lies in the hands of a bean-counter.