It’s not often that Dave Niehaus, the Mariners’ jocular Hall of Fame broadcaster, is rendered speechless. But last season, when a conversation about baseball turned to the subject of performance-enhancing drugs, Niehaus sputtered, turned red, and finally blurted out, “I don’t want to talk about steroids!” Interview over, let’s play ball.

Nobody wants to talk about baseball’s love-hate relationship with steroids, but it won’t go away. Juicing returned to the front pages in February when Sports Illustrated reported that Alex Rodriguez—the Mariners’ prodigal child, who left Seattle for fame and enormous fortune in Texas and New York—was one of 104 ballplayers who failed drug tests in 2003. Days later he admitted that he took steroids from 2001 to 2003, his first seasons after leaving the M’s. He swore he hadn’t touched performance-enhancing drugs at any time before or since—though he’d sworn earlier on national television that he’d never taken them, period. Fans are left to wonder now about the 36 homers and .358 batting average he accumulated in 1996, his breakout season with the M’s, and the hundreds of long balls he hit in subsequent seasons with the team. Then again, they’re left to wonder about any numbers put up by Major League stars over the last decade.

Baseball’s PED plague reaches deeper into our community than the Mariners would like to admit. In 1995, A-Rod’s second season in the big leagues, the Mariners stormed into the American League Championship Series in an exciting September pennant race that filled the Kingdome and energized the city. The riveting play of Rodriguez, Ken Griffey Jr., Randy Johnson, and Edgar Martinez won the civic and political will needed to push through a $500 million financing package to tear down the Kingdome and build a new stadium that voters had previously rejected. Griffey, Johnson, and Martinez have never been accused of using PEDs, but we know now that performance-enhancing drug use had become pervasive in the game by that season. In other words, the great baseball we witnessed had been at least partially aided by PEDs, whether they were used by Mariners players or opponents. The result of that now-questionable power surge, Safeco Field, opened in July 1999. Niehaus threw out the first pitch, to the accompaniment of the Seattle Symphony. “That is still one of the great thrills of my life,” he said last season. “[Safeco] is still baseball’s greatest stadium.”

PEDs were as common as Gatorade by the time Safeco opened its doors in July 1999, according to former player and confessed steroid user Jose Canseco in his two tell-all books, Juiced and Vindicated. At the time of the first book’s publication, Canseco was dismissed as an opportunist who would throw anyone under the bus to sell a book, but his revelations have been repeatedly proved right. Indeed the M’s team that took the field for that first game at Safeco included Rodriguez at shortstop as well as Ryan Franklin, David Bell, and David Segui, all of whom were later named in the Mitchell Report, the 2007 independent investigation into the use of PEDs in Major League Baseball led by former U.S. Senator George Mitchell. Segui, who played on seven teams between 1990 and 2004, was something of a Typhoid Mary of steroid use; according to Mitchell, he was good friends with steroid-peddling trainer Kirk Radomski.

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The new stadium saw its share of drug-enhanced highlights. Franklin, who pitched for the team for six seasons, received a 10-day suspension in 2005 after testing positive—the only Mariner at the big league level to be disciplined for using PEDs. According to Mitchell, pitcher Ron Villone had human growth hormone shipped to him at Safeco during a stint with the M’s in 2004. Illegally altering their physiques and games didn’t stop Villone and Franklin from preaching good citizenship on behalf of the team. Both participated in Washington Mutual Home Run Readers programs at grade schools in Bothell and Sammamish. Several onetime Mariners, such as Glenallen Hill, Josias Manzanillo, and Fernando Vina, were named by Mitchell, but their reported use of PEDs happened after they’d left the team. José Guillen, on the other hand, had purchased PEDs as a member of the Oakland A’s prior to his 2007 stint with the M’s.

Like so many players, Guillen had sworn in print that he would never touch the stuff. For that reason, the unreported suspicions and circumstantial hints at what may have gone on behind the clubhouse doors loom larger than what has leaked out so far. In 2001, for example, when the team racked up a superb 116-46 record, Bret Boone put on the greatest performance ever by an M’s second baseman, with 37 home runs, 141 runs batted in, and a career-high .331 batting average. Mitchell didn’t name Boone, but Canseco did, though he had no direct evidence of Boone using PEDs: “I remember one day during 2001 spring training.… I got a good look at Boone,” he wrote in Juiced. “I couldn’t believe my eyes. He was enormous… Sure enough, Bret used his hulking new body to go crazy that season. He practically doubled a lot of his numbers.” Boone denied Canseco’s claim in 2005, telling the Seattle Post-Intelligencer there was “no chance” he was ever tempted to use steroids. Nobody but Canseco has claimed otherwise, but, then, Canseco has been the only player to out a fellow member of the baseball brotherhood. Boone’s 2001 numbers still stand as team records for his position.

In 2001, Safeco also hosted the All-Star Game, surely one of the largest assemblies of PED users ever to take a field. Only years later would it become clear that it was something of a who’s-who of drug users in baseball. On the field that day, and all later named by Mitchell and/or Canseco, were Barry Bonds, Ivan Rodriguez, Juan Gonzalez, Roger Clemens, Andy Pettitte, Jason Giambi, Troy Glaus, and Magglio Ordoñez, as well as Boone, Sammy Sosa, and A-Rod. Fittingly, the MVP award went to Cal Ripken, who was in his final season and was always considered to be a paradigm of clean play.

So many players like A-Rod have been caught with their hands in the steroid jar after denying they juiced, it’s gotten harder to be sure that any given Major Leaguer was clean. Canseco estimated that as many as 80 percent of all ballplayers were using during the steroids era. Why didn’t anyone step forward and say, “This has to stop?” I asked former M’s reliever Jeff Nelson that question at Safeco last September. “Why would they [speak out about steroids]?” he replied. “The game is going so well, the numbers are jumping up, fans are being put in the stands…. Everyone turned a blind eye.”

Today the Mariners, together with the rest of Major League Baseball, seem to see steroids as old news and the tough drug policy adopted at the start of last season as a new beginning. “We support the commissioner in his efforts to test,” club spokeswoman Rebecca Hale says of MLB’s man in charge, Bud Selig. “The goal is to get PEDs out of the game.” A worthy goal, but it hasn’t laid the issue to rest: The ripples of the steroids scandal are still widening, as the hubbub over A-Rod’s changed story shows. But for perhaps the first time in the stadium’s history, games at Safeco are now being played on a level field.