Parties Discuss Testing Policy

Days away from a scheduled congressional hearing on steroids, top officials from Major League Baseball and its union quietly opened discussions this week regarding recommendations for a tougher drug-testing policy spelled out in last month's Mitchell report on steroids use in baseball, according to a source familiar with those talks.

The talks began Tuesday and are ongoing, according to the source, and included MLB President Robert DuPuy and Rob Manfred, baseball's executive vice president for labor relations, plus Michael Weiner, the union's general counsel.

On Tuesday, Commissioner Bud Selig, union chief Donald Fehr and former Senate majority leader George J. Mitchell are expected to appear before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee. Mitchell authored an exhaustive investigative report into steroid use in baseball, in which 92 players were named as users and dozens of recommendations were made to rid the game of performance-enhancing drugs.

A second day of hearings, previously scheduled for Wednesday, was postponed until Feb. 13, and is expected to feature pitcher Roger Clemens and his former trainer Brian McNamee, who told Mitchell he personally injected Clemens with steroids and human growth hormone at least 16 times between 1998 and 2001. Clemens has repeatedly denied those charges and earlier this week filed a defamation suit against McNamee.

Many of Mitchell's recommendations for baseball did not require negotiations with the union and were implemented earlier this week by Selig. Among those changes, teams will no longer be notified the night before testing personnel arrive, and all clubhouse personnel will be subject to background checks and random drug tests.

However, the substantive changes to the drug policy recommended by Mitchell must be bargained with the union. Among them: full independence and transparency for the testing program; year-round, unannounced testing of players; and the flexibility to adopt "best practices" modifications as they become available.

"These recommendations," Mitchell wrote in his report, released Dec. 13, "are designed to work in combination with one another to create a new environment, one that is more aggressive in deterring the use of performance-enhancing substances, while still protecting the rights of the player. I believe the principal beneficiaries of these reforms will be the majority of major league players who play clean and follow the rules."

Also yesterday, committee staffers sought to play down the notion that the Clemens-McNamee hearing -- which also is expected to feature former Clemens teammates Andy Pettitte and Chuck Knoblauch and former New York Mets clubhouse attendant and convicted steroids distributor Kirk J. Radomski -- has escalated from a hearing to a full-blown investigation simply because the postponement has given the committee time to depose witnesses in advance.

"The delay was . . . more about being sensitive to some issues with the Justice Department," said committee chief of staff Philip Schiliro, referring the Justice Department's request that the hearing be postponed until after Radomski's Feb. 8 sentencing. "If it went on Wednesday [as scheduled] we still were going to be investigating. We still could have gone forward with a good hearing. The difference is, we now have time to take depositions."

David Marin, the committee's minority staff director, added, "Our 'full-blown investigations' normally take months, even years, to complete."

Still, the sudden prospect of depositions adds a new layer of legal peril for Clemens and McNamee, since they will now be subject to open-ended questioning under oath by lawyers representing the committee without the strict time limits imposed on committee members during a hearing.

Those depositions are expected to begin next week, according to sources familiar with the schedule, with Clemens's deposition likely to come on Wednesday, the day the hearing was originally scheduled.