BRADENTON, Fla. -- The current edition of the Pirates will not be touched by Major League Baseball's newly announced investigation into past steroids use, but they were not without opinions on the matter yesterday.

Outfielder Jason Bay, the team's union representative, described commissioner Bud Selig's decision as being the direct result of the recent wave of negative publicity.

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"They've taken care of steroids going forward, as far as the testing that's in place now," Bay said. "But I think the past has come under such scrutiny that, I guess, going forward wasn't enough to make up for the past. Now, they're going back and trying to remedy that to appease, I guess, the right people."

Reliever Salomon Torres took no issue with the initiative.

"They must know something if they're going to do something about it," Torres said. "The law is the law, you know. As much as you love some of those guys, if you break the law, you must pay for it. There's no excuse. There's a reason why they're looking into this."

Outfielder Craig Wilson expressed two reservations.

One was the purpose of such an investigation.

"You can go back as far as you like, and it's really not going to change anything," he said. "Whether or not a guy did something 10 years ago, I don't think that carries any weight now. I think we should be more concerned about what's happening today."

Another was the fairness in how baseball's panel chooses whom to investigate, particularly if it is limited to those whose statistics might appear suspicious.

"If you're going to be doing things like that, it's almost going to be more of a witch hunt because you're only talking about certain guys," Wilson said. "If you're talking about getting every player from the last 10 years, that's great. But you can't just say you're going to go for the guys who had a good year or good numbers or something like that."