He spent the first part of this week in Arizona, in and out of various major league clubhouses, places that have generally been inhospitable to academics and scientists and yet oddly welcoming to marginal characters who don't know much but know somebody who knows somebody else who can probably hook you up.

So there was really no other approach but to put it to him point blank, as he is after all, Dr. Jay Hoffman, not just a consultant to several major league clubs on the matter of sports science, but the chair of the department of health and exercise science at the College of New Jersey.

What would he have baseball do to keep its clubhouses off limits to the likes of Brian McNamee and Greg Anderson, people of no legitimate scientific pedigree, people whose primary baseball function was drug mule?

Who knew that would ever become a primary baseball function?

"Make sure you hire the best strength and conditioning coach possible and pay him accordingly, not $70,000," Hoffman said pointedly. "Baseball has an unbelievable opportunity in that it's one of the only sports that has levels of systemized athletic development from very young players -- 16 years old -- to guys in their 30s and there is unbelievable potential for great scientific advancement.

"Every club should have a director of athletic performance established at the same organizational level as the minor league coordinator or assistant general manager. Baseball's very far behind in the area of sports science. If you have a Porsche and it's not working well, you bring it to a Porsche dealer and their engineers, not to a Sunoco station on the corner. Major League clubhouses are filled with Porsches, but there were people in major league clubhouses who were doing effectively that, taking them to the Sunoco station on the corner, and if the clubs turned a blind eye to it, shame on the clubs. The bottom line is that you have to have people who understand the nature and the physiology of baseball players."

Pirates CEO Frank Coonelly, in his role as Major League Baseball's counsel and troubleshooter prior to succeeding Kevin McClatchy, drew up a document outlining the game's new approach in this area. Though all teams have long employed certified professional athletic trainers, the academic backgrounds of auxiliary personnel in that area, particularly of strength coaches, was somewhat checkered. Coonelly's document essentially said that all strength coaches must have master's degrees and two years of experience specifically as a strength and conditioning coach.

"The motivation behind that document was that in many cases, the person who arose as the person in charge of strength and conditioning was the assistant to the professional athletic trainer," Hoffman said. "It left no one to answer with any expertise questions about steroids and performance-enhancing drugs. That's why players started looking outside for answers, which led to the influx of personal trainers coming into clubhouses.

"I don't think everyone has adhered to Coonelly's memo, but the great majority of clubs do have fully certified strength and conditioning coaches."

Before he was Dr. Hoffman, before it became clear to him that he wasn't going to be a professional football player with the New York Jets or the Philadelphia Eagles or the USFL's Tampa Bay Bandits, all of whom signed him to free agent contracts a long time ago, Jay Hoffman went looking for answers too.

"I used steroids for three years when I was trying to play in the NFL and with Tampa Bay in the USFL," he said. "I used a physician that some bodybuilders knew in New York. Empirically at the time 60 to 75 percent of lineman were using them, and it was just a matter of maximizing my chances. It was just kind of accepted as what was going on. It didn't have the connotation, but it's different now. Even minor league baseball players are role models and all athletes, whether they want to be are not, are role models. They've got to take responsibility for their actions."

Even though it was a different era with perhaps a different ethos, Hoffman has taken responsibility for his own steroid past, which is probably why baseball won't hire him to establish the kind of uniform sports science framework that would likely benefit the game immensely if only by keeping people like McNamee and Anderson away from it.

Hoffman was interviewed for the Mitchell Report but finds the document itself a mixed success.

"I think people in baseball are just trying to get past it," he said. "When you think of the money spent on the Mitchell Report, if it didn't have [Kirk] Radomski and McNamee [providing many of the names of users], it would be toothless. If you look at this problem and conclude that it happened mostly in two cities, well, the problem was much greater than that and they know that. But certain aspects of it are very good, particularly on the importance of baseball educating itself on this."

As the first baseball season post-Mitchell looms, the game can open itself to the science of physiology and performance related to a level playing field, or generally retain its old-school tobacco-spittin' anti-intellectualism and just go on lying to itself and, ultimately, to Congress.

For the moment though, when Congress had to pick the liar between the seven-time Cy Young winner and the personal trainer with a certificate from a southern diploma mill, it asked the FBI to start a perjury investigation on Roger Clemens, not McNamee.

You'd think the game would be anxious for some radical changes.