''Lonesome" George Thorogood is far better equipped than most to speak about the ongoing steroids controversy in baseball. Prior to being 'Bad to the Bone,' Thorogood was a semi-pro baseball player who, even today, speaks as passionately about Sandy Koufax versus Bob Gibson as the Rolling Stones versus the Beatles.

So, who does the guitar slinger think is responsible for the steroids controversy that has dogged baseball for more than a decade and has implicated such major players as Barry Bonds, Mark McGwire, Roger Clemens and Alex Rodriguez? "If Keith Richards wrote the number one song of all time back in 1973 and he was mixing cocaine with heroin to do it, what do you think the president of that company and the producer of the record would give him?" Thorogood asks Spinner. "They all understood what was going on. Everybody knew what was going on. Nobody cared because the ball was going into the seats. That thing had been going on for years; somebody was gonna find an edge."

Thorogood believes the problem baseball has is dishonesty. "The wrong thing was they lied about it. That's what really hurt the fans," he says. "Paul McCartney would've never done that. Tennessee Williams said he wrote 'Cat on a Hot Tin Roof' taking pure methedrine. Just tell the truth, 'I took steroids so I could hit all these home runs.' If they had just said that half the battle would've been over, I think."

But they didn't tell the truth, creating a PR nightmare fot the sport. The next wave of that nightmare will happen when players like Sammy Sosa, Clemens and A-Rod become eligible for the Hall of Fame like McGwire, who has yet to be elected. Do those players make the HoF? "I'll tell you what they do, have a steroids hall of fame," he says. "All the guys that took the steroids are in a different hall of fame, Barry Bonds; McGwire, Rodriguez. Then you got the regular guys, [Hank] Aaron and all those guys. I think it's not fair, they should give the umpires steroids, and the announcers, and the coaches -- then it's fair all the way around."