Back when baseball’s Henry Aaron tenaciously negotiated with the Atlanta Braves for a $200,000 annual contract, as he chased Babe Ruth’s home run record, this writer had the privilege of spending a working weekend with “Hammerin’ Hank.”

Indian Head Inc., then an NYSE-listed, Fortune 500 company, had developed a pitching machine for kids. So Hank Aaron and a very-young yours truly went to Chicago to help promote this and other fun “PitchBack” products at McCormick Place’s annual sporting goods show. We also did some radio and TV interviews, and visited a youth recreation site on the Near North Side – enabling me to spend quality time with one of the game’s true gentlemen. Even without that weekend’s experience, this unabashed baseball fan has admired Hank’s exploits, solid citizenship and good common sense.

Accordingly, it would be good if the baseball establishment sparked to his recent call for full disclosure of the 100 or so players who tested positive for steroids or steroid-like substances during MLB’s 2003 pilot program. That information has been dribbling out via leaks and enterprise reporting, and for baseball and baseball fans it has been both distracting and dysfunctional.

Disclosure would provide the extra impetus baseball needs to take its past and current silly seasons and put ‘em in the books, once and for all. Like it or not, and legalities notwithstanding, that can probably only be done by releasing the entire roster.

Mr. Aaron has it quite right when he says the game should just “get it over and let baseball go on.” After all, almost everyone knows there was (and perhaps still is) a Steroid Era, so let’s just call it that, give the players a kind of intentional pass, and let people make their own judgments about a time in the sport when the temptations to use or ignore questionable substances for short-term gains were too great for too many great and near-great players.

Once the list is out, we can all deal with it for a while and then be better able to move on. That would put the focus on what really matters to the game and its fans – the playoff races, the athleticism, the excitement and (yes) the beauty of what is still our national pastime – while making sure there are real teeth in the rules to punish current and future juicers.

Pretty good public relations strategy, and not just for baseball.

Thinking about how information is emanating from MLB and the players’ union these days brings to mind a phrase connected with Watergate. Rather than getting the whole truth out and sincerely trying to put the matter behind them, the Nixon team used what John Ehrlichman termed a "modified, limited hangout." Put another way, the policy was to tell some truth, but not the whole truth.

The result of this unsuccessful deception, along with many other errors of omission and commission, was President Nixon’s resignation 35 years ago. Many people went to prison anyway, and the fallout from it didn’t subside for many, many years. Lots of smart folks in the PR profession have posited that, if Nixon had immediately implemented an unmodified, unlimited hangout, he might have had a full-term presidency, remembered more for achievement rather than disgrace.

By definition, a successful cover-up, by people or institutions seeking to avoid embarrassment or worse, is one the public never finds out about. Yet we do know of so many, many situations where they backfired big-time.

Those of us in the crisis communications business each have prime examples to cite. So let’s identify (without further comment) a few new and older ones worth considering as object lessons:

In a world of 24/7 news, search engines, blogs, tweets and other tech tools that leave virtually no stone unturned, we would all be wise to realize – morality notwithstanding – cover-ups don’t work.