Ninety-six years ago, 511-game winner Cy Young told Sporting Life magazine the secret of his success.

“A player should try to get along without any stimulants at all,” he said. “Water, cool pure water, is good enough for any man. “Young also advised that, “swinging an axe hardens the hands and builds up the shoulders and back.”

If only Jason Giambi had heeded this advice.

Assuming that the testimony leaked to the San Francisco Chronicle is accurate, the once-hulking Yankee first baseman admitted to a federal grand jury last fall that he had used several performance-enhancing drugs (PEDs), including human growth hormone, testosterone, and mysterious substances referred to as “the clear” and “the cream.” These substances were provided to him by Greg Anderson of Balco, a California firm being investigated for distributing PEDs to elite athletes in baseball, track, and other sports.

More tellingly, the report mentioned the anabolic steroid Deca Durabolin and the female fertility drug Clomid. If you really want to know what’s going on in baseball, the rare and sophisticated drugs Anderson allegedly provided to Giambi are a red herring. The real shock isn’t that the massive Giambi was using “the clear,” it’s that before meeting Anderson, the defending American League MVP was using Deca in 2001. This is, in steroid terms, the rough equivalent of Lance Armstrong showing up to the Tour de France on a Huffy.

To understand this, you might want to type the name “Bill Roberts” into your favorite search engine. The probably pseudonymous Roberts is the formulator of a product advertised as “Anabolic Dominance-Mag 10: The Destroyer,” which promises that its “microemulsion technology” will bulk users up. A real talent, Roberts is also a writer for shady steroid Web sites like “Testosterone Nation” and “Mesomorphosis,” for whom he dispenses staggeringly detailed advice to steroid users.

Clomid, as Roberts has it, is quite a useful drug. Intended to stimulate ovulation in infertile women, it is also apparently “the anti-estrogen of choice for improving recovery of natural testosterone production after a cycle […] and is also effective in reducing risk of gynecomastia during a cycle employing aromatizable steroids.”

Basically, the drug Jason Giambi was taking prevents the hypothalamus and the pituitary gland from being inhibited by estrogen of the sort that the body produces while on a steroids regimen. It does not in itself promote mass gain, but allows one to use other drugs without growing breasts.

Cynthia Fitzpatrick, a spokesperson for the FDA, pointed me toward several documents, including drug labels and case studies that confirmed this as an essentially accurate description of the drug’s effects. To my knowledge, no large studies have been done on the effects of off-label use of the drug, but it is, interestingly, counter indicated for people with latent pituitary problems. (One wonders whether or not Giambi or his supplier were aware of this.)

As for Deca Durabolin, it is not considered a high-end product, though it was 20 years ago. Only about half as effective as testosterone at building muscle mass, it is valued for its lack of visible side effects: A user does not lose hair or develop tell-tale steroid acne. Use does often result in complete impotence, though this can be corrected with the use of testosterone.

What we can surmise, then, is that at some point in his career, Giambi – who weighed about 180 pounds when he was drafted – started taking a mildly outdated steroid to gain muscle mass, and a cocktail of other drugs to prevent such side effects as growing breasts and losing the ability to perform sexually. He was on this program during at least one season, 2001, in which he hit like Lou Gehrig in his prime – although, frankly, his claims that he had used no PEDs prior to that year lack credibility. Only within the last two years did he make a connection with someone who could provide him with better drugs than those used by duffers in zebra striped workout pants down at the local gym.

You’ll forgive me, I hope, for finding the image of a macho, tattooed Giambi fretting over the prospect of lingerie purchases blackly comic. It’s also deeply pathetic. I know I am supposed to feign indignation, shock, and outrage, but why bother? There will be more than enough of that to go around. This is not the story of a morally decayed sybarite intent on ruining the values of his country, but that of a dumb jock desperate for greatness and willing to risk the ruin of his body to attain it.

I would guess that the main reason Giambi is falling apart while other, older players on steroids haven’t is that he isn’t really much of an athlete. His muscles aren’t lean or elastic; they have simply been stretched too tight and are now snapping. Quite possibly of equal importance is the quality of the drugs he was taking and the quality of the cycles he was on; even the regulated program offered by Balco left him prone to the side effects of human growth hormone, such as diabetes and giantism, and the unknown effects of “the cream” and “the clear.”

Giambi is no victim, and no one need feel any measure of pity for him. He made his choices and now he has to live with the consequences.

We should, though, ask ourselves the hard questions that come out of this. If an American League MVP was on such a crude program with such apparently horrible results, exactly what kind of chemistry experiments are minor leaguers and high school players performing on their bodies? What is happening to them? Exactly why aren’t safe, high-grade PEDs, relatively free of side effects, commercially available? And what are the benefits of banning these drugs when set beside their obvious costs?

It would be a fine thing to return to 1908 with Cy Young, when water was all a ballplayer needed to compete. But as Jason Giambi will tell you, that’s just not the world we live in anymore.