The news broke today, via ESPN, that Major League Baseball is looking to punish around 20 players connected to a Miami-based performance-enhancing drugs scandal, including Ryan Braun and Alex Rodriguez.

Good. If the evidence shows these players are complicit in PED use, suspend them.

PEDs have to be run out of baseball, and it’s clear that this notion that the Mitchell Report of 2007 somehow cleaned things up forever and ever, amen … is thoroughly wrong.

On one level, I have come to accept that drug use, particularly anabolic steroids, is common (if not endemic) in certain sports. Among them, football, rugby, cycling, weightlifting and track and field.

But I will not cynically accept them in baseball, and here is why:

More than any game anywhere, baseball is about its statistics. More than a century of statistics, almost pathologically tracked from the founding of the game.

Some believe that the preoccupation with baseball numbers is a particularly American behavior, and the game in this sense fills some deep need to quantify … everything.

Turns out, not everyone in the world keeps records of every game ever played.

Here in the UAE, the soccer federation only recently has done a remotely decent job of keeping track of games played by the national team. They actually are not at all clear about records that Americans would have tracked from the start. Who played the most games. Who scored the most goals.

I remember a conversation with Ruud Gullit, during his brief time  as coach of the Galaxy, and the Dutchman made a point of poking fun at the American love affair with sports statistics. Soccer would never, ever be quantified in such a way, he said. (Which turns out to be wrong, as the companies who now report to coaches in England, and in the UAE, too, how many miles every player ran, how many passes he completed, how many giveaways he made, etc.)

Back to baseball.

This is a game with far more history that football or basketball, and what helps make it great is that it is very nearly the same game in 2013 as it was in 1913.

That enables people who love the game to compare players from a century ago to those who play now, taking into account some variations for equipment and stadiums.

An on-base percentage of .400 was good a century ago, and it is good now. An ERA of 2.00 was good then and now.

A fan can look at the statistical record of Tinkers, Evans or Chance and be able to recreate the ballplayer in our mind’s eye. Thirty doubles means something. Forty steals means something. You can make a man out of his numbers.

Numbers matter, and that is where steroids and PEDs come in.

They tweak the game. They came close to destroying it, 10, 15, 20 years ago, when all sorts of “outlier” performances began to crop up. Suddenly, Mark McGwire hit 70 home runs in a season; Barry Bonds hit 73 in a season and 755 in his career. A guy who had never hit 20 homers hit 50. Stuff like that. And dozens and dozens of elite players were found to have been using drugs — or still remain under a cloud of suspicion.

Our ability to compare the statistics from the 1920s, when Babe Ruth was playing on beer and hot dogs, to the 1990s, when McGwire was playing on steroids, was warped.

A part of our history was taken from us. And much of what happened for a period of nearly 20 years was brought into doubt.

We preferred to think baseball finally addressed the issue, with the Mitchell Report, and perhaps we felt fairly confident when the likes of Manny Ramirez and Bartolo Colon and Melky Cabrera got suspensions of 50 games for failing drug tests.

Maybe it was working! Finally, our numbers were real. Again. We liked to hope.

Then came the Ryan Braun mess, following his 2011 MVP season, when he failed a drug test but beat the rap on a brazen, chain-of-custody defense. The sick feeling of guys beating the system came back, with a vengeance.

And now we have a case where a batch of prominent players may have be facing 100-game suspensions.

Clearly, the rules and the punishments from before were not effective enough. The stakes are too high for many scofflaws, who will roll the dice and hope they can get away with their cheating.

Random testing, sure punishment, eternal vigilance.

If baseball bans two or three or four guys every season, the system might well be working.

When you get 20 in one shot, then you have a problem. Still. Or again. Then you have systematic cheating. Baseball needs to turn up the heat on malefactors. True fans will not object.