SCOTTSDALE, Ariz. -- Commissioner Bud Selig informed a House committee on Monday that he will testify at its hearing set for Thursday at 10 a.m. ET on Capitol Hill to review the history of steroid use by Major League Baseball players.

The Commissioner made his decision and notified Rep. Tom Davis (R-Va.), the chair of the House Government Reform Committee, that he had voluntarily decided to appear. The committee subpoenaed 11 MLB players and executives and had originally only extended an invitation to Selig.

"I told Tom Davis today that I'd gladly volunteer to go and talk about what baseball has done to deal with this issue," Selig said, when reached by telephone at his Milwaukee office. "He accepted. I'm proud of where we are and the gains that we are making. I've been telling this story and I'll go to Washington and continue to tell the story."

MLB also met a noon ET deadline Monday set by the committee and delivered boxes of subpoenaed documents to its Washington, D.C., office, an aide for the committee said.

The committee, which last week subpoenaed documents relating to MLB's steroid policy and test results, was sifting through the paperwork on Monday afternoon to determine whether baseball had complied.

MLB had previously said it would object to the document subpoena, plus subpoenas demanding the testimony of MLB vice president Sandy Alderson and Padres general manager Kevin Towers. But it seemed increasingly obvious over the weekend that the committee was going to stand by it demands to have all the notified MLB players and personnel attend the hearings. Selig said on Monday that MLB attorneys were now moving forward to determine who would comply with the subpoenas.

"We expect them to [all attend]," Davis said Sunday on NBC's "Meet the Press." "It is a public health crisis and our testimony from medical experts is going to show this. We have the parents of kids who have used steroids and committed suicide. Over a half a million youth are using steroids, and these Major League players are their idols. Major League Baseball has not come down hard on this. Players have not been out there denouncing it."

Jose Canseco, Mark McGwire, Jason Giambi, Curt Schilling, Frank Thomas, Rafael Palmeiro, Sammy Sosa, MLB vice president Rob Manfred and union chief Don Fehr have also been subpoenaed. Schilling, Thomas, Canseco, Manfred and Fehr have agreed to attend.

Thomas has asked the committee to depose him this week in Tucson, Ariz., where the White Sox are training, so he doesn't have to fly to Washington. Thomas is recovering from a fractured bone near his left ankle and says the foot severely swells up when he flies. But if he doesn't get a pass, Thomas said he will appear at the hearing.

But attorneys for Giambi, Palmeiro and Thomas sent letters to the committee on Monday asking that all three clients be excused from the hearing. Giambi, they said, had already answered many questions "forthrightly" about his steroid use during testimony to a federal grand jury investigating the Bay Area Laboratory Co-Operative (BALCO).

About Palmeiro, the attorneys wrote that he "should not have to appear at a hearing prompted by scurrilous and wholly false allegations by a former player (Canseco)." And in behalf of Thomas, the attorneys argued, among other things, that having him travel to Washington would inhibit his recovery from surgery on his ankle. "It is no exaggeration to say that his career is now hanging in the balance," they wrote. "A failure to return to his previous level of performance as promptly as possible could jeopardize his future in professional baseball."

The committee had yet to respond to the requests, but it has insisted that the players participate, even threatening contempt-of-Congress charges, a criminal offense that carries with it punishment of up to one year in prison and up to a $1,000 fine.

Davis, the committee's chair, said on Sunday that the committee wasn't using that as an idle threat. He was backed by Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Calif.), the lead Democrat on the committee.

"Well, that's what it could ultimately come to, but I hope it doesn't because I think it's important to have an investigation of steroids in Major League Baseball," Waxman said. "To me, the shocking thing is that baseball doesn't seem to have been much concerned about all the steroid stories about their players over the last 10 years. We shouldn't be doing these hearings. They should have been doing these hearings and for a number of reasons."

Selig said on Sunday that he wasn't averse to conducting an internal baseball investigation of steroid use as long as it was done "very sensitively" and "would be very confidential."

Selig said that he has worked tirelessly to restructure baseball's medical staff and drug polices on the Major and minor league levels since 1998 when androstenedione, a legal steroids precursor, was discovered in McGwire's locker.

"Call me naive, but I had no idea what was happening before that," Selig said, adding that he was outraged by the committee's assertions that MLB hadn't done anything to attack the problem, even hammering a table with his fist for emphasis during a press conference on Sunday.

Only a week ago, Selig reported that positive tests for steroid use in the Major Leagues last year were 1-2 percent, down from 5-7 percent in 2003, the first year there was random testing.

Selig had hoped that the committee would give MLB's new drug program, with its tougher penalties and more random tests, a chance to work.

But Canseco's recent book, in which he admitted his own steroid use and said he had knowledge that former teammates McGwire, Giambi and Palmeiro were also users, spurred the committee to take a close look at the problem.

"They say that baseball didn't do anything about it," Selig said. "We did a study at Harvard that we financed with the players association. We now have a deal with Drug Free America and we will be doing a lot of public service announcements. I'm very puzzled by that. We've moved forward the last four or five years."