It was baseball’s perfect day. The Twins capped one of the more memorable and unlikely comebacks we’ve seen in years, taking the AL title when the Tigers lost to the Royals — the worst team in baseball. The Dodgers and Padres went into the final day of the regular season tied for first place, while the Cardinals very narrowly avoided one of the worst collapses in baseball history. The Cubs’ president, Andy MacPhail, resigned after his team finished the season with National League’s worst record. And baseball fans everywhere outside the five boroughs reveled in the fates of Pedro Martinez and Randy Johnson, whose injuries suddenly made the best teams in baseball seem vulnerable.

While this was happening, the story below the fold was performance-enhancing drugs and a future Hall of Famer.

Depending on your perspective, the disclosure that Roger Clemens was mentioned in an affidavit given by former Yankees relief pitcher Jason Grimsley to federal investigators this year was the best-kept secret or the most pervasive rumor in baseball.A reporter for the Los Angeles Times — who was able to nail down the story when a source agreed to give him access to an unredacted version of the document — confirmed what most everyone with an interest in such matters suspected (and what another source had previously disclosed): Grimsley had linked Clemens and several other big stars, including the former American League MVP, Miguel Tejada, and the beloved former Yankee Andy Pettitte, to steroids and other performance enhancers.

This is a tangled story, but it appears Grimsley accused Tejada and several of his Orioles teammates of taking anabolic steroids, and Clemens and Pettitte of using human growth hormone. It’s unclear whether the accusations are based on first-hand knowledge, rumor, or speculation, but the men he named were his teammates. According to the L.A.Times report, Grimsley also claims it was a former Yankee trainer — who was employed as a personal trainer to Clemens and Pettitte — who put him in touch with the drug dealer who sold him hGH, steroids, and amphetamines.

All of this grows stranger still when

you consider the denials Clemens and Pettitte issued yesterday. Clemens was quoted as saying,”I’ve been tested plenty of times.My physicals I’ve taken, they have taken my blood work. I have passed every test.”

Baseball does not, of course, test for hGH.

“I’ve never used any drugs to enhance my performance in baseball,”Pettitte insisted in his own statement.These might simply be words of a nerve-wracked but perfectly innocent man. But the superfluous qualifier would be — if it came from the mouth of a politician — described as a “non-denial denial.” As would Clemens’s insistence he passed tests he was never administered.

So, there are two questions here: First, is it ethical for the press to report on this? Second, are the accusations credible?

Whether or not you believe the entire drugs in baseball mess is a witch hunt, when someone accuses the greatest pitcher of all time and other major league stars of using performance-enhancing substances in a sworn affidavit — it’s news, regardless of the accusation’s truthfulness.The lead investigator in the case, IRS agent Jeff Novitsky, was also the lead investigator in the Balco scandal, which implicated Barry Bonds, Jason Giambi, and Gary Sheffield, among others.

No matter how you look at it, this story meets all the criteria for newsworthy. Beyond that, if the baseball press were really comprised of nothing but sordid rumormongers, this news would have hit the papers months ago. More or less every reporter and pundit in the country has either talked to someone who says they’ve seen these names in the affidavit. It’s not a stunning revelation.

As to the second question, I suppose it depends. Personally, I don’t like to read players’ statistical lines and infer drug use. Drugs don’t work that way. So looking at Clemens’s historically unprecedented performance — at 44 he’s still the best pitcher in baseball — and assuming he’s on drugs doesn’t make much sense to me. Certainly, just because Pettitte had his best seasons after he started working out with Clemens, “working out” does not necessarily mean he was taking drugs with Clemens. No matter how oddly couched the denials are, both men have denied the charges, so until new evidence presents itself, it’s only fair to take their word over second-hand accounts of what might well be an accusation made by a player in a great deal of trouble and under a great deal of pressure from investigators.

That’s my position, but you’d have to be an idiot to think these accusations have no credibility. In the context of baseball’s drug scandal, Clemens’s performance has been, at the least, incredibly suspicious. There’s no way around it. And it hardly took these accusations for people to think that the vaunted Pettitte-Clemens workout routine might have entailed more than simply running, Steve Carlton-style, in barrels of grain.These new revelations do more to confirm what had been suspected than to shock.

It’s understandable that people are at this point sick of these scandals, but for the game to move on, the truth will have to come out. And the truth is that not every player who uses steroids or hGH is a Bonds-style cartoon villain. Some of them are good, decent men — good teammates, active in their communities, who play the game admirably and with integrity. They also inject illegal drugs to gain illicit advantage. Similarly, some and perhaps many of the game’s best players have used drugs, a point that seems absurdly obvious post-Bonds, but bears repeating. It wouldn’t surprise me a bit to learn that every MVP and Cy Young Award winner dating back 15 years had been using something. It would sadden me, and I’d be more surprised to learn that, say, Pedro Martinez had used steroids than I was to learn that Bonds had used them, but it’s the reality of the game.

Years into this scandal, the only surprise for me at this point is that these revelations continue to shock people. Drugs are a reality of the game, just like they are in every sport.From the Tour de France to the Ultimate Fighting Championships, high-level athletes do things people wouldn’t believe to gain competitive advantages, from using enhanced blood to sweating off 25% of their body weight in eight hours. Whether Clemens, Pettitte, Tejada and the others accused are innocent or not, the fact remains that sports are brutal and athletes do violent things to their bodies. The sooner people stop being shocked about it all, the better.

tmarchman@nysun.com