Because it will involve neither the greatest pitcher in baseball history nor a confessed drug dealer, nor any discussions of what was injected into where by whom, nor any surreptitiously taped conversations, tomorrow’s congressional hearings on baseball’s drug scandal haven’t got as much attention as those scheduled for February 13. This is a shame. Roger Clemens and Brian McNamee, who will testify next month, are characters in a garish freak show that at this point has little more to do with baseball than do the latest travails of the Spears or Clinton families. Commissioner Bud Selig, players’ union chief Don Fehr, and former senator George Mitchell, conversely, are right now the three strongest power brokers in the sport, and all of them will be on Capitol Hill tomorrow for the hearings that really count.

Even by the low standards of seriousness exemplified by past congressional inquiries into baseball scandals, though, tomorrow’s should disappoint. Rep. Christopher Shays, a Republican of Connecticut, and a member of the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, which is holding the hearings, set the tone during an appearance on Bloomberg Radio this weekend. Referring to the drug policy recommendations made by Mitchell’s December report, which include greater reliance on uncorroborated evidence and more coordination with the Department of Justice, Shays said that Selig “should tell the owners of baseball that this is the standard that he is going to implement, and if they don’t like it, then find a new commissioner,” and that players should strike if they don’t like it.

If this was mere posturing, and if the hearing was merely a pretext for pandering politicians to pose as populists, it would be unobjectionable. Unfortunately it is not posturing, and the hearings, held by people who hold views more befitting enraged WFAN callers than elected officials, will have real consequences. Rep. Shays is just one among several powerful legislators, among them Rep. Bobby Rush, who have sounded off about passing drugs legislation if they don’t like what they hear from Selig and Fehr.

This is dangerous not just because these politicians have no idea what they’re on about, although that’s bad enough. (If you were to take a sip of beer tomorrow afternoon every time one of them incorrectly impute performance-enhancing properties to human growth hormone, for instance, you would die of alcohol poisoning.) It’s dangerous because the fundamental premise of their approach to baseball’s drug problem, which is that central baseball and the players union can fix it, is simply wrong.

Political writer Matthew Yglesias has discoursed on what he calls the Green Lantern theory of international relations, named after a superhero who wears a magic green ring that allows him to essentially do anything he can imagine, limited only by the power of his will. As Yglesias notes, many politicians seem to believe that “there are only goals, force, and will, and the only relevant question in any situation is whether we have the will to achieve our goals with force.” The world is not a comic book, though, and even the most determined, powerful state, with the most just cause, has to adapt its policies to events beyond its control. To act as if all failures are failures of will is to pretend that the state is far more powerful than it is.

If this is true of great powers, how much more true it is of baseball commissioners and union leaders! When Rep. Shays says, as he did to Sports Illustrated last week, “I don’t want to hear any excuses. This is not an issue of compromise,” he shows himself to be tightly gripped by the Green Lantern fallacy, by which all bad things can be made to go away if only people will just try harder.

This is just not so. For instance, take baseball’s drunk driving problem, an issue that has (rightly) resulted in no congressional hearings. Tony LaRussa, the manager of the St. Louis Cardinals, was caught drunk and asleep behind the steering wheel of an SUV last year. Months later, Josh Hancock, one of his pitchers, died while driving drunk. Jim Leyritz, an employee of Major League Baseball, allegedly killed someone while driving drunk last month. The problem is serious enough that some teams have banned alcohol in the clubhouse.

No one would presume to blame, or even really criticize, the commissioner or the union head for the drunk driving problem. Everyone understands that they would prefer no one die because of it. The problem isn’t that they’re not willing to try hard enough to stop such deaths; the problem is that society is to a certain degree tolerant of driving under the influence, and so has to accept that people will die because of drunk driving, whether they are ballplayers, lawyers, or musicians, or bakers.

Selig and Fehr certainly have vastly more control over drug policy than they do over whether or not managers and players decide to risk other people’s lives by driving drunk — but they only have so much control. Whatever baseball tests for, and no matter how it decides to test, it can no more eradicate drug use than I can walk out of my door and onto the surface of the moon. While politicians fret over the scourge of steroids and growth hormone, players have moved two or more generations beyond them. The problem is that there are enormous economic incentives for those who use drugs without getting caught, and all the willpower in the world can do nothing but make life harder for users.

There is a useful role for Congress to play in addressing the drug scandal. More than anything, what baseball needs is not a great soul-baring from the likes of the wretched McNamee, but a policymaking mechanism that brings together a representative of management and a representative of labor with a third, truly neutral party. Congressmen, if they know anything, know bureaucracies and how to build them. They would be far better served to do so than to ask Selig and Fehr to do the impossible.

tmarchman@nysun.com