Baseball has returned to Washington early this spring, and not in the form of the Nationals. Instead, the House Committee on Government Reform has summoned an All-Star team of former and current players, baseball executives, and bereaved parents to testify about the dark cloud hanging over the game: steroids.

Two of the country’s most famous baseball fans, President Bush and Senator McCain of Arizona, both weighed in yesterday on the sport’s drug problem, but today’s hearing won’t produce much more than political grandstanding. The committee announced yesterday that it would not grant immunity to any of the witnesses, all but guaranteeing that the invited players – Jose Canseco, Mark McGwire, Rafael Palmeiro, Curt Schilling, Sammy Sosa, and Frank Thomas – will take the Fifth Amendment or issue tired denials.

Fresh from his tour to promote his recent book, “Juiced,” Canseco was perfectly willing to continue pointing the same fingers he says he used to inject himself and others with steroids throughout his career. Canseco, of course, has already been heard, but the loudest sound was the ringing of the cash register. He has hinted that he has more evidence, but without immunity he’s unlikely to do anything more than wink and smile at the truth. Canseco’s lawyer, Robert Saunooke, said the former slugger will not be able to answer questions that would incriminate him.

“It begs the question as to what they’re convening this hearing for,” Saunooke told the Associated Press. “They effectively cut the legs off from underneath us.”

As for Commissioner Bud Selig and union head Donald Fehr, their time will most likely be occupied by stubborn defenses of baseball’s new steroid policy. Expect the committee before which they sit to then charge that the weak policy is a detriment to every high school athlete in the country.

To prove this point, they have a star witness, Donald Hooton, whose son, Taylor, committed suicide in July 2003 after quitting steroids at the behest of his parents. The elder Hooton, who formed the Taylor Hooton Foundation to combat steroid abuse, claims to have research that shows anabolic-androgenic steroids are a leading cause of teenage suicide. His foundation’s Web site has generated quite a bit of publicity, in forums as varied as “60 Minutes” and gyms across football mad Texas.

Bush yesterday expressed concern about young Americans using steroids.

“I do appreciate the public concern about the use of steroids in sport,” he said, “whether it be baseball or anywhere else, because I understand that when a professional athlete uses steroids, it sends terrible signals to youngsters.”

Hooton will presumably deliver his stump speech before Congress, and while no one will fault him for his earnestness, he is known to be light on facts. His tears are fresh and the emotion raw; unfortunately, he is not an expert on steroids and undermines his own credibility by making questionable claims. Hooton stands on emotional appeals, using charts and graphs from sources as varied as steroid defense attorney Rick Collins’s “Legal Muscle” and the oft-quoted 1999 Mayo Clinic survey that said between 5% and 11% of high-school boys had tried steroids.

The truth is that steroids are one of the most unresearched substances in existence. Any attempt to conduct human trials recalls the worst of Manfred Hoppner, the Dr. Frankenstein of the East German sports machine. There are ways of checking the effects, but logic seldom stands against the emotional appeal of a dead child.

It is doubtful that anyone will mention Propecia, an anti-baldness drug that acts within the body much the same as many popular steroids, sharing chemical function and side effects such as sexual impotence. Propecia is used by millions and declared safe in the FDA’s clinical trial process.

No one will talk about the 1997 study that gives us the best model for the medically controlled use of steroids. In it, PJM van Kesteren and H. Asscheman detailed the long-term administration of androgenic agents to 300 female-to-male transsexuals. This most extreme surgery and the concurrent hormone therapy startlingly showed no serious morbidity in any of the cases. In fact, their opposite counterparts treated with estrogen showed a far higher incidence of medical problems.

Perhaps these issues will be addressed by the drug-abuse counselors and psychiatrists taking the stand. More likely, though, the sound bite will come from the head of the World Anti-Doping Agency, Gary Wadler, who famously said that baseball’s new drug policy “does not go far enough.” Wadler charged that baseball’s policy was a ruse to remove congressional pressure, one that appears to have failed.

That much became clear yesterday with the reappearance of McCain, a master at using sport to focus the spotlight squarely on himself. It was in large part because of a threat of legislation by McCain, a Diamondbacks season ticket holder, that the steroid policy was originally crafted last year.

The new testing agreement, which Selig’s office turned over to the committee earlier this week, along with other subpoenaed documents, includes a provision that testing would be “suspended immediately” if the government conducts an independent investigation into drug abuse in baseball. The 27-page agreement, which has yet to be signed, also retains a provision that allows the commissioner to substitute fines for suspensions, including $10,000 instead of a 10-day ban for a first offense.

McCain said two months ago that the agreement “appears to be a significant breakthrough,” but he changed course yesterday after reading the details.

“I can reach no conclusion but that the league and the players union have misrepresented to me and to the American public the substance of MLB’s new steroid policy,” the Arizona Republican said in a letter to Selig and Fehr.

So it would appear the government isn’t the only organization going about things the wrong way. The wording of MLB’s new policy seems to give the office of the commissioner the ability to circumvent the prescribed penalties, perhaps keeping the results from the prying eyes of the public. For a league attempting to show that it is beginning to control a problem, these latest public-relations blunders have undone any momentum they may have had entering the hearings.

All told, we’ll hear sound bites of athletes denying their use of steroids, perhaps falling back on their Fifth Amendment rights. We’ll see the tears of parents blaming steroids for the loss of their children. We’ll see the now-tired posturing of Congress, treating baseball as something more than sport and seeking the obeisance of its lords. We’ll see more pointing of fingers, more prepared statements, and more legalistic smoke screens, the typical fare of any televised hearing.

What we won’t see are any hard facts or even a hint of resolution. In a town that worships the fair and the balanced, we might just see a Washington first: the no-sided discussion.