A couple of days ago, three farmhands of the Local Red-clad Stick-and-ball Nine were suspended for 50 games by Major League Baseball after testing positive for doping.

50 whole games.

On the baseball calendar, that’s a little less than two months.

Compare that to the news in cycling on Thursday that former Saunier Duval-Scott rider Riccardo Ricco has been suspended by the Italian Olympic Committee for doping at the Tour de France. No time frame was set, primarily because it’s officially a temporary suspension to sideline Ricco until the big two-year suspension kicks in under World Anti-Doping Agency rules.

Both the baseball suspensions and the cycling suspension are for the first offense.

Less than two months in baseball. Two years in cycling.

And to think the mainstream media that breathlessly covers mainstream ball sports in the U.S. has the gall to call the Tour de France a “farce,” or “tainted,” or “doping-marred” when a rider tests positive.

It’s kind of annoying, because cycling has been more up front and is doing more than any sport anywhere in dealing with doping, Mitchell report or no. Doping has been criminalized in France, where Ricco and several other TdF riders face charges, fines and jailtime. Got that? Jail! In the U.S. that only has happened for athletes proven to have lied to grand juries about doping.

And in cycling, an A-sample positive generally brings an immediate dismissal of the rider by his team, even before it can truly be called a doping offense. The WADA code requires a positive finding of a B-sample as confirmation of a positive A-sample to constitute a doping offense. But a dismissal flies as soon as an A-sample comes back positive. Sponsors also have been known to bail out at the first sign of trouble to protect their “brands,” even though a B-sample test theoretically could come back negative.

Could you imagine the Local Nine closing down a farm team when three performers test positive? I doubt that would happen, yet in cycling, Ricco’s doping positive prompted his team, Saunier Duval-Scott, to pull out of the Tour de France, and then Saunier Duval pulled its sponsorship. (Scott, an American bicycle company, has since replaced SD as the main sponsor, with American Beef signing on as co-sponsor.)

To his credit, Ricco admitted his use of a new generation of EPO, called CERA, so no B-sample test was necessary. He also might get a lesser suspension of one year for cooperating with authorities, assuming that what he has said about riding clean at the Giro d’Italia is confirmed by the expected re-testing of his Giro samples for CERA — a substance that wasn’t detectable at that time, just two months before the Tour.

So, let it be said that cycling is doing more to weed out the dopers and has harsher punishments for doping violations than any sport, tho the dismissals and the guilty until proven innocent perception after a single positive still trouble me. (What if Ricco had been clean and his B-sample negative? Then his whole team would have been out of the Tour de France for no reason.)

The reliability of the testing concerns me as well. Ricco was tested 12 times at the Tour and recorded just two positives, which even he admitted should have been 12. That’s horrible. And don’t get me started about the holes in the Floyd Landis case despite his smackdown by CAS.

On the other hand, I’m quick to laud the independently administered anti-doping testing programs that four elite-level cycling teams have undertaken to be at the forefront of the sport’s anti-doping movement. American-based Garmin-Chipotle and Columbia, and CSC-Saxo Bank and Astana have such programs with invasive unscheduled testing, which records and tracks blood markers of the teams’ riders over time, thereby allowing testers to identify spikes in values that could be evidence of doping. (Just last week Astana cited “abnormal values” in firing a rider.)

The Agency for Cycling Ethics (ACE) administers the Garmin-Chipotle and Columbia tests, and international anti-doping crusader Rasmus Damsgaard, MD, PhD of Bispebjerg University Hospital of Denmark conducts the Astana and CSC-Saxo programs.

But CSC having Damsgaard’s reknowned program didn’t stop Italian authorities from administering a pop whiz — a random anti-doping check — on CSC-Saxo rider Frank Schleck when the Tour de France overnighted in Italy. And it didn’t stop French authorities from stopping and searching the cars of Schleck’s father and a Schleck family friend during a stage back in France. The searches and the testing were negative.

It’s kind of sad that exceptional performances are met with such skepticism that they have to be verified by anti-doping controls and searches, but that’s the world in which cycling lives, and it’s the price the sport is willing to pay to curtail doping, clean up the sport and authenticate performances.

Until mainstream sports subject their athletes to the same level of scrutiny with the same harsh penalties, they just aren’t in the same ballpark.

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