With advance apologies for the baseball cliche, it is more important than ever to keep our eyes on the ball in the aftermath of the Roger Clemens fiasco this week.

It is all too easy to be distracted by grandstanding politicians, by squirrelly little steroid-dealing strength coaches, by blustery former superstars. It is all too easy to think we’re sorting out baseball’s past when in fact we’re still talking very much about baseball’s present.

Unbelievably, the men who presided over the decade-plus that led us into this mess still hold their jobs. Commissioner Bud Selig let this happen on his watch. Players’ association chief Donald Fehr enabled his rank and file’s every step down the path to institutionalized cheating.

Unbelievably, they and the rest of baseball want us to believe the steroid era ended with a wave of some magic wand over the last couple of years. Meanwhile, with no reliable way to test for human growth hormone (HGH), you can be absolutely certain that many of baseball’s biggest and highest-paid stars are employing the next generation of Brian McNamees and Greg Andersons to inflate their numbers – in the box scores and on their paychecks.

Watching Clemens sink in a rising tide of contradictory statements and gross illogic, it was easy to focus on this one player and his probable misbehavior – just as it has been too easy to single out Barry Bonds the last couple of years.

As spring training opens, Bonds doesn’t have a job. If Clemens was contemplating another midseason emergence from another “retirement,” that’s no longer possible. Mark McGwire, Jose Canseco and Rafael Palmeiro are miles away from the local ballpark.

But the passing of one generation of cheaters does not mean the end of the culture of cheating – in baseball or any other sport.

If there was anything to be learned from Wednesday’s Clemens vs. McNamee showdown in Washington, it was just how casual the use and abuse of substances really has been in baseball (and, you can surmise, in other major sports as well).

Maybe the most puzzling thing for many of us is the way so many athletes choose to lie and continue lying when they get busted for cheating. If there is testimony or a paper trail, they say they never failed a test. If they fail a test, they say the tests aren’t any good.

The actions of Clemens and the depositions of Andy Pettitte and Chuck Knoblauch suggest an explanation: Cheating is such an accepted part of big-time athletics that these guys really don’t believe they are doing anything wrong.

That’s a depressing theory, but the more you think about it, the more sense it makes.

One overlooked item from Wednesday was Clemens’ casual mention that he and Pettitte were using ephedra-based supplements right up until “a player from Baltimore” died after using ephedra.

The player had a name – Steve Bechler – and when he died in 2003, baseball hadn’t yet banned ephedra. The NFL, the International Olympic Committee, the NCAA, and even the U.S. military had banned it by then.

Selig and Fehr: always a step behind.

The line between acting legally and cheating is arbitrary, and is constantly being redrawn as new products are developed and as health risks become apparent.

Baseball’s problem under Selig and Fehr is that it waited way too long to draw that line at all, meaning it tacitly approved of the pharmaceutical binge that perverted the game.