If You Think A-Rod is the Doper, the Bigger Addicts are MLB and YOU.
Sadly, Major League Baseball (MLB) is plagued with addiction, but it is not the players who are hooked on performance-enhancing substances (PES); It is the fans who are addicted to the homerun ball, and the MLB owners who are hooked to the power and money that flows from the real addiction driving this ends-justify-the-means version of professional baseball.
A-Rod's "confession" just adds another nail in the coffin of post-strike baseball from 1994 until today. I say today, because, in spite of the Mitchell Commission Report and ongoing crucifixion of Barry Bonds, the real addicts, you the fans, and the owners, have not been brought to account for all of this.
At my "other job" at MLN Sports, we've spent the last decade following the hypocrisy of MLB's two-tiered testing system, one for the 40 Man Roster, and a separate one for the minor leagues. It is a kind of steroids-shell game, where you can protect better players who are steroid users by moving them around a bit in the system.
In December, after the Mitchell Report was neatly timed to be delivered during most baseball writers' vacation time, we stayed home and knocked out "The Perfect Test," an investigative report into the way that the supposedly "tougher" minor league anti-doping system was in fact a sham, and how it was used, in conjunction with the weaker major league policy, to protect top prospects who were doping.
We followed that up in January, 2008, when one of my top writers, Christopher Hadorn, interviewed Olympic anti-doping expert Richard (Dick) Pound in "A Pound of Cure," where Pound flatly rejects MLB's weak assertions that it can do nothing about any of this with the heel dragging of the MLB Players' Association (the PA).
The bottom line: If MLB wanted to keep baseball steroid free, there is a lot that they could do to stop it.
There is no trainer worth their salt that cannot spot the signs of steroid usage. There are trainers who have reported users to their clubs.
The information is either squelched completely, dealt with on the Q.T. internally, or turned over to the Commissioner's office which, as we can see from the A-Rod case, also means that the big-dollar player remains protected from public censure.
If teams started losing roster spots for the remainder of the season clubs and their trainers would develop much tougher policing systems. There are probably a dozen other reasonable enforcement mechanisms that MLB could use too, if they wanted to do so.
The reason that this does not happen is because, even though no one wants to admit it, steroids are in the best interests of baseball for everyone but the players whose lives they are shortening.
MLB fans have become juiced by the Juiced Era of the game. They want the big home run. They want the hulking monster who crushes baseballs, and because the naturally-occurring version of those are few and far between, to borrow the old soda sales slogan: "Things go better with Juice."
There are even people now suggesting that the new way of dealing with this is the public mea culpa. Bonds refusing to acknowledge steroid use: Bad. A-Rod in the sweater looking comfortable discussing the issue: ABSOLVED.
So MLB has no problem doing its version of Adolph Menjou in Casablanca, rounding up "the usual suspects," a few also-rans that either postive test on their own, or possibly, with a bit of assistance.
One has to ask how a kid from the Dominican who makes around $25,000 a year or less to play baseball is getting their hands on $30K worth of designer roids and exotic HGH composites, or why other players in the minors who were never "caught" by the supposedly iron-clad minor league testing system with its vaunted 0.9% positive rate, were juicing the whole time.
In our "Perfect Test" players told us that even the lab technicians administering the test were helping compromise it.
It is not in MLB's interests to do much more than wag its finger at steroid use, just enough to avoid having Congress re-examine their much-vaunted anti-trust status, because they know that other than for the occasional sensational headline or publicity seeking politico, the fans really don't care.
That was demonstrated quite clearly for them during the Barry Bonds home run chase. Mr. Selig let Bonds continue his quest to break Aaron's much vaunted record because it generated record attendance in spite of, or perhaps exactly because of, the steroid controversy.
Baseball can't end the steroids witch-hunt because Congress has taken an interest, and because drug usage has been tied to the periodic question as to whether MLB should maintain its much-enjoyed Federal anti-trust exemption, the only one of its kind for any business in the United States of America.
How does the steroids era end? It really is up to you, the fan. Are you ready to weaned off of them? Are you willing to see one-quarter to one-third fewer power hitters take the field? To see pitchers retire without the extra seven or eight years of their big league careers?
As long as you keep tuning in, and visiting mlb.com, and buying jerseys with "Bonds" and "Clemens" and "Rodriguez," then not one of you should be throwing stones at A-Rod. He is a symptom. You, and the owners milking every last dollar out of you without regard to their stewardship of the game or the ethics of damaging the health of these amazing athletes, are to blame.
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Can't we just have 2 leagues for professional sports? One for juicers and one for those whose accomplishments should go in the record books, Hall of Fame, etc.
Let them juice, but who cares about keeping any records, what's the point unless credit goes where it is due--and that won't be the "atheletes", and please don't let them be part of the permanent record of baseball, or be in the Hall of Fame--they can have their own, but what's the point?
Will a juicers' Hall of Fame credit the right drugs for their record breaking feats? Fair is fair :)
As a devoted fan of the game for 30 years, I resent the caricature of fans addicted to the heavy action of the game. Baseball has largely become a game for the players, their agents, the clubs, the licensees, broadcast stations and the corporate backers.
It is no longer a "fan's game" - not with ticket prices in the upper stratosphere that have risen not with inflation, but more so with the game's insular pursuit of unchecked greed. As fans who largely can't afford tickets, we are forced to spend hundreds to watch the games on tv. Even the gear we fans wear to show our support is ridiculously priced, with jerseys skirting the $100 range.
That said, is it surprising then that fans have little to hold onto but for the more fast-paced and thrilling parts of the game? Or the numbers that allow us to enjoy the game only through our fantasy leagues? I'd be happier paying $30 for a long and lazy game at the ballpark where the score is 3-2 than to watch it on tv or to just scrape the box scores to update my fantasy roster any day. How dare anyone say the fans are to blame for A-Rod or any other cheating player's behavior! Seriously.
I love baseball, and what bothers me most is that it doesn't bother me at all. I don't care that A-Rod did this, but I would agree that the fault lies with the owners more than the players
Well, no, Pizz. Actually the fault lies with you, and every other fan that doesn't care and buys a ticket. There was more outrage about gambling during the Chicago 1919 Black Sox scandal not because there was more moral indignation about it, but more because gambling and fixing games had long been a seething undercurrent to games in the early days of baseball. MLB wanted to be seen as cheat-free to an audience that also turned out in measure because they bet illegally on baseball games.
There is no such incentive for them with steroids. They improve play. You're williing to pay. End of story.
Wake me when football season starts.
A comment of which MLB should take note. It happens way too often for anyone to call it America's National Pastime anymore.
Like Max Kellerman said, If there was a pill that would triple your income with adverse side affects, would you take it?
If there are REAL penalties and not slaps on the wrists then you will see these drugs and hormones go away. If A-Rod is kicked out of MLB for two years with NO PAY then we'll see who wants to bulk up with them. If its costs him 40 million and a trip to teh Hall of Fame we'll see if he has such a light attitude about it. The fact is that just like movie stars these guys think they are above everyone else. The night after this broke he was doing a Letterman skit making fun of this. There are rules or there are not.
There are no real penalties because the rules are bent to accommodate not only the superstars, but the rising stars. It isn't the player that is the problem here. They work inside the system. If you penalize a team one forty-man roster spot per player, major league team or farm team, caught doing steroids for the remainder of the season, then you will see how fast baseball clubs start policing themselves. Try being down eight or ten roster spots and functioning in September if you're in contention.
"They work inside the system."
Then THAT'S the problem, NOT the fan!!!!
If professional baseball players are willing to risk themselves for the potential rewards, then so will college players who want their shot at the pros. High school players are equally serious about the game, and they still have the youthful aura of invincibility. They are fine with risking old age for a chance at some years of glory. In any vice you can think of, junior high kids want to do whatever high schoolers do. Even 12 year old teams traveling the country can be far more serious than those teams on TV playing on the tiny fields in the little league world series, and they have parents helping them get every possible advantage.
Excellent point. They also know that there are rules, and then there are the Rules. If you want to play the game to win, and the scout comes and tells you that your kid has a lot of great tools but is missing size or bulk, it is pretty clear what you have to do to get where you want your kid to be. In that, things have not changed much.
Also, record clearer: It is Performance Enhancing Substances (PES), not Performance Enhancing Drugs (PED) - HGH is not a drug. It is a hormone. Most reporters don't get this right.
sorry, you're way, way late in making A-Roid out to be a victim. that was locked in as soon as it came out the info was from seald records.
He's not a victim. He is part of the system. What I am saying is that its use, by the nature of the system of Major League Baseball, is condoned, even when MLB tries to protest that it is not.
That's the fundamental point, that all of this could not have gone on without everyone's participation in this, no different than the decision to keep a certain group of players out of the game. As long as there were behinds in the seats and lucrative TV contracts, the players are little different from any other group of workers, except for salary differential. Most players, also and alas, do not come close to ARod money.
So why is Congress not after the owners?
Agreed.
MLB players in the last two decades were as crooked and inflated as our financial industry.
Baseball has one of the most well-funded lobbying mechanisms on Capitol Hill. The Commissioner of Baseball was an office established by MLB to keep the Congress off of its back for regulation after the Chicago Black Sox gambling scandal in 1919. Since then, the Hill has looked to the Commissioner as the fair arbiter of all things Unfortunately, with the used car salesman and "former" owner in charge of MLB, the office is nothing more than a mouthpiece for the will of the owners, and has paid lip-service to the Congress (e.g. The Mitchell Report) but still knows how to sweep a good scandal under the rug.
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