You’d have thought before yesterday that Jason Grimsley’s major league legacy was bad enough. The longtime scrub pitcher and former Yankee was best known for having admitted to crawling through an air duct and into the umpires’ locker room during a playoff game to swap out a clean bat for teammate Albert Belle’s corked bat. No one who gets stuck with that assignment has to worry about getting voted into the Hall of Fame.

Don’t feel too bad for Grimsley, though – he made about $10 million during his baseball career, and can’t have spent more than a small fraction of that on human growth hormone (hGH).

That Grimsley spent at least some cash on the stuff was revealed in the embarrassing tale that hit the streets this week. Grimsley’s house was given the once over twice by a team of 16 federal investigators Monday, and the baseball world was agape at the accompanying search warrant affidavit, which revealed that Grimsley had given up more locker room secrets than Jim Bouton and Jose Canseco 10 martinis deep into lunch with Patrick Fitzgerald.

Having been the subject of a sting operation growing out of the bizarre ongoing IRS investigation into drug use in baseball (these people must have better things to do), Grimsely briefly cooperated with investigators, during which time he revealed that speed is a heck of a drug and that he’s big into hGH. He also named a self-described “boatload” of ballplayers on performance-enhancing drugs, and while those names were redacted from the publicly available version of the search warrant, they’ll probably leak within a few minutes of the time you read this, if they haven’t already.

Given that the well-traveled mediocrity has played for six different teams during a career that’s spanned the entire length of baseball’s steroid era, you can be sure that a great many ballplayers, some of them famous, are very nervous.

Grimsley is finished in baseball. He asked for,and was given,his release from the Arizona Diamondbacks yesterday. (In many ways the most shocking turn in this story is that Grimsley had a major league job. Who knew?) So now, aside from salacious speculation about the names of the players redacted from those documents, the issue becomes hGH and speed, about which no one really cared two days ago, and which everyone is going to care about now.

Speed is a non-issue. It’s being tested for starting this year, but it’s been such a big problem is baseball that,as Grimsley told investigators, until this year major league clubhouses had separate pots of coffee – those laced with the stuff and those without. I don’t understand why anyone cares about this substance – anyone can get all the Ritalin and Adderall they want for such pressing needs as writing term papers, and there’s not much difference between that and ballplayers popping greenies. Anyone who expects ballplayers to play three hours a night, every night, stimulated by nothing more than good cheer and love of the glorious American game just isn’t thinking clearly.

HGH is a totally different subject. I don’t know whether it works, and I don’t think anyone else does either. Most people I’ve talked to about the stuff over the last couple of years thinks it needs to be “stacked”with insulin and various kinds of steroids to provide any real effects, while others say it enhances eyesight and reaction time and generally works as a youth serum. The truth is probably somewhere in between.

Whatever the case, off-label use is illegal – and not in the wink-and-nod way amphetamine use is – and has incredibly nasty side effects. Man’s liver, after all, is not meant to grow to the size of a basketball.

Conveniently for the player seeking an edge on the competition, no test currently exists for hGH. Be quite certain that some of your favorite ballplayers swill the stuff like Red Bull, and that it works for at least a few of them. (they probably also don’t see what the big deal is – hGH is a natural hormone regulated by everyone’s pituitary gland,and the passages of Jose Canseco’s book in which he evangelizes for the stuff are a fair representation of what happens when you talk to anyone who uses it – “It’s natural! I’m 40 years old and have the body of an 18-year-old.The Man fears evolution,” etc.)

What should baseball’s reaction to all this be? I’ll be damned if I know. One popular solution is to hold samples of players’ blood and urine until such time as a test for hGH becomes available. While the idea of retroactive exposure has a certain appeal, it doesn’t really make any sense.

Say a test is developed five years from now. (Scientists have been claiming for nearly 20 years that a test is a few months away; it’s best to assume it isn’t coming any time soon.) Why exactly would a Jason Grimsley type care? If you sit a young stud down and tell him that he could be exposed five years from now if he uses hGH, that will mean something; he can reasonably expect to still be playing then, and the threat will have traction. For some random Grimsley-type,though, who may be in his 30s and no more talented than a few dozen Triple-A players, the threat is meaningless – he might not be able to compete without drugs, he’ll probably be out of the game in five years, no one will care when his name is revealed, and his pockets will be stuffed with the money he’s earned in the meantime. It’s a conundrum.

That there’s no easy answer here doesn’t mean baseball shouldn’t do anything (or that it should, for that matter). It’s just to say that when baseball writers go on about the loopholes in the current testing regime, we’re not just being cynics. Baseball is about as clean right now as it’s going to be.Anything more will require players to suddenly stop wanting to obtain unfair advantages, and that’s just not going to happen.

What’s more, it’s just going to get worse. HGH is one thing, but what will happen when we discover that the first player to hit .440 had some help from the South Park Genetic Engineering Ranch? Jason Grimsley will be a fond and hilarious memory, associated mainly with his moment of playoff glory, and all the while he’ll be smoking fat cigars and counting his money. Baseball’s a great game so long as you don’t look at it too closely; our IRS investigators may deserve jeers for busying themselves with something so insignificant as baseball, but at least in doing so they’ve given us a real clear view of what really goes on when players aren’t praising God for helping them drive in runs.

tmarchman@nysun.com