By Ferd Lewis
Advertiser Columnist

Can the Boston Red Sox hold off the New York Yankee$? Will Alex Rodriguez and Derek Jeter be able to co-exist in the Bronx Zoo? Will Jack McKeon be AARP's man of the year again?

Those are some of the issues that should be the talk of baseball right now, from the Cactus League to the Grapefruit League — and beyond.

Instead, the headlines of the day have left us to necessarily wonder anew what the sport's Supermen are spiking their spinach with and what sluggers might be regularly sprinkling on their Wheaties.

A San Francisco Chronicle report that investigators were told some of baseball's biggest stars, Barry Bonds, Jason Giambi and Gary Sheffied, were among the pro athletes receiving substances from a California laboratory implicated in illegal steroids, is but the latest and most disturbing log on a fire.

Now, it isn't which players are going to make the rosters that invites spring training speculation as much as what they might be storing in their medicine cabinets and injecting themselves with.

As the curtain is pulled back a little more and baseball gets increasingly nervous at the revelations, it is time that the sport finally comes clean in addressing both the issue and its solution. The hope is that it will happen before we find that the players, owners and caretakers of the game have been abetting a dirty secret with connivance and negligence.

You only need to look at some of those who have built themselves up to Incredible Hulk proportions — or, conversely the few who have now reduced themselves to more mortal profiles — to wonder how bad this could be.

Houston's Jeff Kent made a clumsy yet revealing attempt at spin doctoring over the weekend when he said, "Babe Ruth didn't do steroids? How do you know?" he asked the Houston Chronicle. "How do you (bleep) people know?"

Never mind that the first steroids weren't manufactured until well after the Bambino's playing days were over and overindulgence in beer and hot dogs have yet to be shown as enhancing performance. Kent's arrogant message, later retracted, came through loud and clear: What's the big deal, players have been looking for an edge for years.

But this is more than cork in one bat. This is a whole genie coming out of a steroid bottle. What was only a faint whisper of skepticism about the time Roger Maris' home run record fell is becoming a growing roar that baseball can no longer ignore. And it shouldn't.

Suddenly, baseball is being forced to confront one of its worst fears: That its records are really being made in the lab and that it has covered it up all along.

Next to gambling fixes, long the scariest of skeletons rattling in baseball's closet, there should be no bigger fear for a sport that so lives on its statistics.

Reach Ferd Lewis at flewis@honoluluadvertiser.com or 525-8044.