Baseball players and owners will high-five themselves and think they’re quieting critics by agreeing to a slightly tougher steroid-testing program.

Don’t be fooled.

The new policy, which The Associated Press learned would be announced Thursday, is progress but it’s still just a bunt, not a home run in the effort to rid baseball of performance-enhancing drugs.

If it’s only a watered-down version of the minor league anti-doping program that commissioner Bud Selig has been touting, it’s more PR and a dangerous delay in acting decisively.

Baseball plans a news conference to unveil the details of the revised program for the majors, which, unlike the current system, will include penalties for first-time offenders.

The penalties still appear paltry: up to 10 days suspension for a first positive test, increasing to one year for a fourth positive, a high-ranking team official said, on condition of anonymity.

Under the previous agreement, a first positive test resulted only in treatment, and a second positive test could lead to a 15-day suspension. It would have taken five positive tests for a player to be banned for a year under the old plan.

Contrast that with the World Anti-Doping Agency’s code, adopted by most Olympics sports, where the penalties are normally two years for the first positive test, a lifetime ban for the second, unless there are mitigating circumstances.

Penalties, as crucial as they are to success against doping, are only part of the solution. There are all those devilish details about when and where players can be tested, how the tests will be handled, which laboratories will do the testing, and how extensive the list of banned drugs will be.

Baseball’s new plan can’t work if it doesn’t adequately address all those issues.

New York Mets pitcher Tom Glavine, a senior member of the players’ union, said he thinks the new deal calls for some out-of-season testing and more in-season tests. Under last year’s program in the majors, players could be tested twice during the season. The minor league version called for up to four unannounced tests per year.

Increasing the number of tests even a little is fine, but goes only so far. To really work, there must be total unpredictability in testing _ anytime, anywhere.

“That’s the key if you’re going to deal with drugs like anabolic steroids or human growth hormone,” said Dr. Gary Wadler, a steroid expert and member of WADA’s medical research committee.

“The effects of those drugs and a number of others last long beyond when they’re detectable in the body. Anytime that’s the case, you have to have year-round, unannounced, random testing. Athletes should never know when the tests are coming. Anything short of that, you’re leaving a window of opportunity to circumvent it. Everybody who abuses steroids knows how to play the calendar to avoid testing.”

The problem of performance-enhancing drugs is not limited to steroids and growth hormone. Amphetamines and other stimulants have been banned in the minors, but not in the majors, where there is a long history of players popping “greenies” to rev them up during the season.

It took public and political pressure to get baseball to rework the drug-testing program put into place in 2002. Since then, Barry Bonds, Jason Giambi and Gary Sheffield have been embroiled in the BALCO steroids investigation, Selig and union boss Donald Fehr have been called to testify in Congress about drug-testing, and some legislators have threatened to take action unless baseball beefed up its anti-doping policy.

Baseball has acted but seems to have squandered an opportunity to do more before it revisits the issue at the end of the current collective bargaining agreement on Dec. 19, 2006. The way it appears now, moderately clever steroid abusers can slip past detection and punishment for two more seasons while the players and owners congratulate each other for “solving” the problem.

Rather than tweaking its testing and penalties, baseball should contract out the whole anti-doping effort to the experts at WADA who have studied the complex issue for years and have the resources to deal with it.

Stopping, or at least limiting, doping is a tricky business. It takes medical and scientific experts. It takes trained testers and specialized labs around the world, capable of analyzing samples of players during the offseason in Central America, Japan, Korea or wherever they may go. It takes ethicists and legal scholars to study the issues, panels to adjudicate challenges. It takes impartial leaders to administer sanctions.

WADA has all that and a $20 million a year budget. Baseball has been trying to do it on a shoestring, its whole program overseen by two doctors and two lawyers.

Earlier this year, baseball made the smart move of sending urine samples to the IOC-sanctioned lab in Montreal. Now baseball ought to put the whole anti-doping shebang in WADA’s hands.

“The blueprint has been signed off around the world, including by the United States, in the World Anti-Doping Code,” Wadler said. “If you want the textbook, then look at WADA.

“If the baseball owners and players don’t do it the right way, they’re sending a terrible message and they’re going to have to live with this.”

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Steve Wilstein is a national sports columnist for The Associated Press. Write to him at swilstein(at)ap.org