The Baltimore Sun’s Peter Schmuck surveys the wreckage, recent and distant, and concludes the huge percentages of MLB talent on juice cited by Jose Canseco and Ken Caminiti, might well be accurate.

If Jason Grimsley was able to acquire human growth hormone (hGH) through the mail … and hGH is not detectable under the testing regimen adopted by Major League Baseball … then why would a high-profile, multimillionaire athlete with more than 500 career home runs and a first-class ticket to Cooperstown (Rafael Palmiero) take a chance with the same detectable steroid that was linked to him in Jose Canseco’s tell-all book a few months earlier?

It doesn’t make sense, unless you believe that Grimsley was the Godfather of hGH or that Palmeiro was so isolated from baseball’s other high-profile cheaters that he just didn’t get the hGH memo.

The only thing we know for sure is that Palmeiro tested positive and he handled the news so clumsily that nobody even wanted to believe him after the Tejada B-12 revelations came out, but the latest turn in baseball’s tawdry drug scandal has created an environment where just about anything is – and was – possible.

The names that were blacked out in the Grimsley affidavit eventually will come out, and some of them almost certainly will be Orioles and former Orioles. If the use of various restricted substances was common in the Orioles’ clubhouse – and players were so indiscriminate in their use of anything from “leaded” coffee to the injectable vitamins that Tejada allegedly was bringing in from the Dominican Republic – then you have to concede that Palmeiro’s “accidental ingestion” theory is not entirely out of the realm of possibility.

Of course, Raffy acted so guilty and his lawyers handled the public relations side of the case so poorly that it’s hard to imagine he was truly a victim, but Grimsley has taken us through the looking glass … and we won’t be coming back anytime soon.

The scariest thing about this is what logic really tells us: Grimsley could not possibly be the centerpiece in the blossoming hGH scandal. He could not have been the only player ordering those $1,600 kits through the mail, though he might have been the only one stupid enough to have it delivered to his home.