Well, nice to see the Dodgers taking a really strong stand on the findings of the Mitchell Report.

Five days after the release of the 409-page report addressing baseball's issues with steroids and human growth hormone, the Dodgers signed catcher Gary Bennett to a one-year deal for a reported $825,000, with an option for a second season at the same price.

That's the same Bennett who played for St. Louis last year, and has these key statistics: A .252 batting average, and a place on pages 222-223 of the Mitchell Report, thanks to money paid to Kirk Radomski, the report's all-star dealer of performance-enhancing substances.

Bennett became the first player tainted by Mitchell to sign a new contract, which makes the Dodgers' stance on the report, steroids and HGH quite clear.

The team is strongly opposed to the use of performance enhancers — unless it's by a player they really want to sign.

In that case, maybe they can get him at a discount.

After all, as the backup to Russell Martin, Bennett replaces Westlake High graduate Mike Lieberthal, who made $1 million, batted .234 in absurdly limited duty — but was nowhere to be found in Mitchell's documents.

So he'll save them $175,000 on that position this season. Apparently, that makes a little baggage easy to deal with.

Now, no one is suggesting the players named in the Mitchell report should be blackballed. As I outlined when the report was issued, using former Westlake High player Matt Franco as an example, the evidence against some of those named was, shall we say, significantly less than would be acceptable in court.

But Bennett didn't claim innocence. Instead, he used the excuse that's sweeping the baseball world (wish I'd come up with it, just so I could collect the royalties): He'd only used HGH to recover from an injury. And oh, yeah, it was a mistake. (Especially now that everybody knows about it.)

In other words, he only cheated because he had a really, really good reason. I think we can all get behind that, can't we?

Apparently, the Dodgers can.

In setting the stage for Bennett's signing, Dodgers owner Frank McCourt was quoted as saying, "I'd be more inclined to sign a player that may have been in the report but has explained his conduct than somebody who there's a great deal of suspicion about but whose name wasn't in the report."

Yep, always better to bring in a documented cheater than a possible one, right?

Because that's what this was, cheating. However good the reason (like saving a job, er, healing). However briefly it may have been done (although Bennett, unlike Andy Pettitte, didn't claim it was a one-time, two-day excursion into the dark side of pharmacology). Or however inviting the shortcut may have been that it allegedly provided.

"Rumors were around that it was the wonder drug," Bennett said in a Monday conference call, "that it would help you heal, help the injuries go away a lot quicker."

Technically, it wasn't against the rules of baseball — which buried its head in the sand on HGH to the extent the stuff wasn't banned until 2005. But it was illegal; the penalty for its possession without a prescription can be a jail term of up to five years, as well as a fine.

So it was cheating, and it was criminal.

And it was Bennett's preferred method of dealing with an injury.

None of this bothered the Dodgers.

Presumably, they won't be the last team to sign a player carrying the taint of the Mitchell Report.

But that they were the first — and acted so quickly — doesn't speak very well to how seriously they view the issue.

— David Lassen is The Star's sports columnist. Contact him at dlassen@VenturaCountyStar.com.