To the naked eye, or at least one that's been trained to think the steroids look is what we see on the front of a muscle mag, New York Mets slugger Mo Vaughn might be the last slugger in baseball who would be suspected of using performance-enhancing drugs. The man's physique is about as cut as a jelly doughnut.

	Mets' Mo Vaughn is congratulated by Mike Piazza after hitting a three run homer against the Yankees on Sunday.

You also might think Vaughn would be a likely candidate to take a stand against steroid use, now that every kid in a pair of cleats knows that the juice is loose in the big leagues. He's been a leader in the clubhouse, willing to take unpopular stands, and in the community, investing his time and money in various do-good youth projects.

But Vaughn said he wants to have nothing to do with this issue.

"I wouldn't sign that," he said Sunday before the Mets-Yankees game at Shea Stadium, nodding at a pledge against drug use that the Healthy Competition Foundation, a non-profit organization affiliated with Blue Cross and Blue Shield, asked major-league players to sign two years ago.

It's a simple document. It asks athletes to put their name next to the statement, "I refuse to take performance-enhancing drugs and will discourage others from using them." It's not a call for league testing, or even an agreement to be personally tested. It's about as toothless, as harmless, as pledging allegiance to the United States of America.

	“	I wouldn't sign that. ... It's not because I have something to hide. It's just that we've got to be together as a union if we're going to do anything about this. If individuals go around signing pledges, it could undermine the union. ”
		— Mets first baseman Mo Vaughn

But no way, no how, is Big Mo going there.

"It's not because I have something to hide," he says. "It's just that we've got to be together as a union if we're going to do anything about this. If individuals go around signing pledges, it could undermine the union."

Vaughn's hands-off attitude is common. The Healthy Competition Foundation sent these pledges to 60 of baseball's top sluggers in spring training of 2000, asking them to sign the same statement that more than 12,000 youth athletes around the country have agreed to. Officials followed up with a national media campaign, and calls to the players' agents.

They got two of them back. Only Juan Gonzalez and Magglio Ordonez dared to pen their names to the document.

It is small wonder why Congress held a hearing Tuesday on baseball and steroids.

If ever there was a role for government to step into the business of baseball, it's on this issue. Steroid use among teenage boys is at its highest level ever, due in part to Major League Baseball, and threatens to run even higher in the coming years, due in part to Major League Baseball.

Don't doubt the connection. Steroid use was largely flat for much of the 1990s until an androstenedione-fueled Mark McGwire re-wrote the record books, and youth usage began spiking upward. McGwire's use of the allegedly muscle-building product introduced many young people to sports supplements, which, experts say, serve as so-called "gateway drugs" to the harder stuff.

	Finger pointing by retired slugger Jose Canseco reignited the steroid debate in baseball.

Now come revelations by Jose Canseco, Ken Caminiti, Curt Schilling and other players that there is widespread steroid use in baseball, which, if history serves as any guide, are certain to only encourage more teenagers to stick needles in their bodies. As steroids expert Charles Yesalis notes, the Ben Johnson scandal in the 1988 Olympics, while painted in shame and disgrace, only seemed to heighten steroid use among lay folk.

"Kids said, 'Hell, I don't get drug-tested -- and look at Ben Johnson's body!' " said Yesalis, a kinesiology professor at Penn State who has written several books on steroids.

Alarms went off everywhere. The U.S. government increased the penalties for those caught with anabolic steroids. Well-meaning doctors predicted that the drugs would turn healthy young men into short-lived mongrels, just you wait and see. The death of an emaciated Lyle Alzado, at age 42 in 1992, didn't hurt the cause. Youth use stabilized.

Scaring off kids won't be as easy this time. As any steroids guru in any gym across the country will say: Where are all the dead bodies? It appears to be a small pile, and it's often not clear what role steroids played in their untimely demise. Lyle Alzado? While Alzado speculated that steroids played a role in his demise, ultimately his cause of death was attributed to brain cancer.

Just because we don't know the long-term side effects does not mean there aren't any. But not enough scientific studies have been done to counter the perception that using steroids can be done safely. Particularly lacking, for obvious reasons, are studies on what steroids do to kids, who are experimenting with the drugs at earlier ages.

"Most disconcerting to me is that the levels of use now are higher among 10th graders than they are among 12th graders," Yesalis said. The 2001 Monitoring the Future national survey found 3.6 percent of high school sophomore males had taken steroids, and 2.5 percent of seniors. "That's a problem because the earlier they start, the longer they use."

Mets catcher Mike Piazza said the solution begins with parents.

"I'm not trying to pass the buck but in this day and age I'd say parents need to be completely in tune with their child's development," said Piazza, who like Vaughn said he does not take steroids. "And steroids fall into that genre of things."

He's right. While many parents may talk to their kids about marijuana or cocaine, a Healthy Competition survey last year found that 82 percent of kids say they've never heard a word from their parents about performance-enhancing drugs. That's largely because parents -- as any teenager can attest -- are ignorant on the issue. Half of all parents surveyed could not name one potential side effect from the drugs.

But the movement also needs a few new heroes.

It needs Bud Selig to identify steroids testing as the No. 1 issue in labor negotiations.

It needs President George W. Bush, a former owner of the Texas Rangers, to crack down on the sports supplement industry.

It needs the federal government and prosecutors to address the unfettered flow of steroids from Mexico and overseas, as was documented two years ago by ESPN.com.

Sen. Byron Dorgan (D-N.D.), whose congressional subcommittee called the hearing, has a lot of complex issues to sort through. But it would help the cause if more players came to understand that the most important question is not how this controversy could impact the union, or even the business of baseball. It's how it could affect the decisions of an impressionable 14-year-old trying to make his high school team.

To Vaughn, the comments of recent players are almost a form of betrayal.

"It was disheartening to hear Jose and those guys step out and say what they did, considering what this union and league have given them," he said, hunched in his clubhouse stall.

Vaughn then went out and hit a three-run homer in the eighth, for a 3-2 Mets victory.

In baseball, that's what passes for leadership.

Tom Farrey is a senior writer with ESPN.com. He can be reached at tom.farrey@espn.com.