Selig: Baseball has made progress

WASHINGTON, Jan. 15 (UPI) -- The commissioner of Major League Baseball told a U.S. House panel Tuesday he accepts a report of widespread steroid use in his sport.

But Commissioner Bud Selig said it is also "important to recall the progress we have made. Baseball now has the strongest drug-testing program in professional sports ... We have year-round unannounced testing, including testing on game days, both before and after games."

Selig added baseball uses "Olympic-certified laboratories ... for our testing, and the day-to-day administration has been delegated to an independent program administrator."

The commissioner noted that positives have dropped from "90 violations in the 2003 survey test to just two steroid positives in 2006 and three in 2007."

Baseball and the NFL are committed to finding ways of testing for human growth hormone, which doesn't show up in current urine testing, Selig said.

The commissioner testified before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, along with former Sen. George Mitchell, who delivered the report of his investigation, and Donald Fehr, executive director of the Major League Baseball Players Association.