While the hysteria occasioned by congressional inquiries and presidential throat-clearing has largely passed, Major League Baseball’s steroids crisis has not gone away and is, if anything, getting worse by the day.

The two issues getting the most play these days are Commissioner Bud Selig’s bid to use the steroids issue to gain leverage over the players’ union in the upcoming collective bargaining agreement negotiations, and Barry Bonds’s possibly drug-related health issues, which threaten to end his career. Both of these, however, are essentially more of the same. The first month of the season has actually seen three new developments in the scandal, and none of them are good for the game.

First, a noticeable swing in the balance between defense and offense is lending credibility to the theory that the game’s power-hitting explosion was fueled by needles and pills. Second, Tom House, the widely respected pitching coach, alleged last week that steroids and human growth hormone were being used by major leaguers as far back as the 1960s.

Third, a wave of suspensions of minor-league players and big-league scrubs has not only underlined the problem of drugs, but of the game’s unconscionable treatment of Latin American players, who are testing positive for banned substances at an alarming rate in no small part because of policies that could be characterized as neglectful at best, and exploitative at worst.

On the first point, it is impossible to watch much baseball this year and not notice a tilt toward pitchers. The numbers back this up. In the American League, isolated power – slugging average minus batting average, a measure of extra bases per at-bat – is .144; in the National League, .151. Last year, those figures were .163 and .160, respectively, and over the last decade the isolated power number for both leagues has generally been at .160 or higher.

This isn’t a return to pre-strike levels of power hitting – in 1993, the National League’s isolated power was .135 – and since pitchers as well as hitters are being tested, you wouldn’t necessarily expect a drop in power to be a consequence of an effective testing program, anyway. A cold spring or random chance could well be the cause.

Still, those who, like me, were skeptical of the new testing policy generally listed among the criteria that would satisfy them a notable decline in power hitting. Now that there is one, it should be taken as a bit of evidence that the policy may be working after all, which is good – but also as a bit of evidence that the offensive achievements of the 1990s were as fraudulent as many fans believe them to have been. This can only further undermine the credibility of the sport and its star players.

House’s revelations show just how badly the new policy, no matter its flaws, was needed. One can’t understand the steroids issue without placing it in the context of baseball’s consistent refusal – dating back to the 1960s – to implement a coherent drug policy. Whether cocaine, amphetamines, or steroids were at issue, the men running MLB have consistently ignored the problem and hoped for it to go away, then done whatever was necessary to make the public think it had been solved.

Real irony is at work here; not only did House’s admission put the issue in a historical perspective, but he was quoted as saying, among other things, “We were doing steroids they wouldn’t give to horses.” That pretty much sums up why performance enhancers need to be eliminated from the game.

Yet the main consequences of what House said seemed to be a spurious linkage of his student Mark Prior’s injury problems to steroids, angry denials from old-timers that they had ever used these drugs themselves, and smug assuredness from libertarian types who seem to feel that a long history of drug abuse in the majors somehow makes present-day abuse less bad. That’s a shame. If baseball is to break from its record of doing just enough about drug scandals to make them go away, then retired players, veteran writers, and executives need to be honest about the history of drug use in the game. All parties must avoid the temptation to pretend these problems are solely those of the current generation of players.

Even worse than such nearsightedness, though, is the spotlight drug testing has put on the game’s treatment of Latin American players. This is not a new issue: It was addressed, in “Stealing Lives,” a somewhat sensationalistic book written in 2003 by Arturo Marcano Guevara and David Fidler about the shoddy treatment of a Venezuelan prospect in the Cubs’ farm system.

The authors laid out how ball clubs set up camps in countries like the Dominican Republic, take poor, often uneducated young men away from their families, and pay them meager wages while keeping them in what are sometimes subhuman living conditions. While the washouts get nothing, the best are brought to America, where they play for minor-league teams in small towns for years, during which time they may not ever be coached by anyone who speaks their language. The whole system is exploitative and disgusting.

We’ve now learned that baseball hasn’t even bothered to provide Spanish-language copies of the drug policy to players. Given this cavalier attitude toward player education, it’s unsurprising that, according to the Associated Press, players born in Spanish-speaking countries account for half the major- and minor-league steroid suspensions, while accounting for just under a quarter of the major-league population.

I would dearly love to take the teenage children of baseball owners and drop them in the middle of the rural Dominican Republic, pay them a sub-living wage, and send them all over the island to play baseball under Spanish speaking coaches while expecting them not to violate rules no one has given them in English. Perhaps we would then see a change in the treatment of Latin players.

Drug use by Spanish-speaking players is the result of many factors. Some inducements are the same as those that lead American-born players to use steroids. But other reasons are unique to players raised in abject poverty: Think of the enormous pressure many of these players feel to make money to support their families. What’s more, Boston’s David Ortiz has spoken out about monolingual education by management and the players’ union.

The spectacle of MLB flaunting its long lists of players who have been suspended – lists on which Latin players are disproportionately represented – is fairly disturbing in light of its failure to treat these players, as a class, as fully equal. This is a topic that, unlike drug use, probably is worthy of a congressional hearing.