Before he tardily changed his tune and recanted some of his repeated lies, Pete Rose was a rock of moral relativism.

"If you could cheat and not get caught," the Hit King once asked me, "would you do it?"

If memory serves, I might have said, "It depends."

The conversation concerned corked bats and scuffed balls and other forms of baseball skulduggery widely practiced and loosely policed. Within the cynical confines of the clubhouse, this was the stuff of winks, nudges and feigned surprise.

Later, however, Rose’s appetite for unsanctioned expedience would lead him to unhappy confrontations with the Internal Revenue Service and A. Bartlett Giamatti. Much later, anabolic steroids and their chemical cousins became even more pervasive than chewing tobacco in big league baseball.

Which brings us back to the thorny implications of Rose’s question. To wit: Once you start cheating, when does it stop being innocent?

If an overriding theme has emerged from the revelations and rumors associated with the BALCO scandal, it is that innocence grows progressively irrelevant to the sporting consumer. If there is any correlation between the size of the BALCO headlines and the extent of public outrage they have generated, it is an inverse correlation.

Maybe Barry Bonds has been the beneficiary of designer drugs, as the hearsay testimony of sprinter Tim Montgomery would suggest. Maybe Bonds took on the contours of the Michelin Man through honest sweat, as he has maintained. Clearly, however, the collective uproar over the issue wouldn’t spoil a spaniel’s nap. American society has come a long way from its priggish Puritan roots. In the main, that’s a good thing, if only because it means Alyssa Milano won’t be burned at the stake for witchcraft. Yet we near the point where the distinction between tolerance and indifference becomes blurry. When a sitting president can survive impeachment after lying under oath about an affair with an intern, righteous indignation seems an antiquated attitude. If our culture were still awarding scarlet letters, the A would not stand for adultery, but apathy.

Robert DuPuy, Major League Baseball’s chief operating officer, disclosed Friday that androstenedione has been added to the game’s list of forbidden substances. Since Mark McGwire swatted his then-record 70 home runs while ingesting andro in 1998, the ban theoretically taints Big Mac’s achievement.

Yet the news has been digested more easily than a midnight burrito and McGwire is none the worse for it. Since baseball had no formal position against andro in 1998, any efforts to have McGwire records expunged would run contrary to the Constitutional prohibition of ex post facto laws. More to the point, perhaps, any effort to diminish McGwire’s deeds would be tantamount to jailing a jaywalker during an armed robbery.

Two years ago, Ken Caminiti said at least half of the players in the major leagues had used steroids. Last year, Padres pitcher David Wells estimated the incidence at between 25 percent and 40 percent in his book, "Perfect I’m Not!" Despite ample warnings about new testing procedures, between 5 percent and 7 percent of major league players produced a positive sample last year.

No evidence exists, however, to suggest that these revelations have had any impact at the box office. Though both Jason Giambi and Gary Sheffield have been linked to the BALCO case, the New York Yankees’ average home attendance has increased by 4,574 per game this year. Despite the continuing cloud hovering above Bonds, the San Francisco Giants are again on pace to draw 3 million fans to SBC Park.

A March USA Today/Gallup/CNN poll of professed baseball fans showed that 91 percent favored drug testing in baseball, that 64 percent thought Bonds probably has used steroids and that what spectators might believe does not always determine how they will behave.

I’m as guilty as anyone on this score. I like the game too much to shun it based on the (strong) suspicion that a significant segment of the players is juiced. I cling to the faint hope that drug testing will some day achieve parity with drug masking, and that the traditional balance between pitching and power will eventually be restored, but I’ll still settle for a slugfest if the alternative is tennis.

To most baseball fans, the integrity of the game and its records are of secondary concern to its entertainment value. To many, athletes are expendable entertainers, some of whom choose to compromise their health in pursuit of wealth. Theirs is not the pitiable plight of the veal calf, but the calculated risk of the fat cat.

To some, cheating is not a crime if you don’t caught.