The issue before baseball is not Alex Rodriguez. It is the other 103 names on the list of players who for reasons that boggle the mind were assured of confidentiality if testing revealed that they had used performance-enhancing drugs.
The issue cuts to the heart of what has ailed baseball for much of its history: an inability to see beyond the moment. It is as if baseball, like the men who play the game, measures life a pitch at a time.
Baseball's enduring lack of foresight has undermined the great game, time and again. It kept the sport from drawing upon the vast source of remarkable athletes it consigned to the Negro Leagues because it could not see beyond the shameful limitations of its racism. It allowed the sport to be overtaken by professional football as the nation's most popular sport because it insisted that an alignment fashioned in 1903 still worked for a changing America. It could not accept that its players might have claim to the wealth that the owners kept to themselves -- and as a result created a tradition of profound mistrust with the players' union.
Most recently the game was woefully slow to appreciate the damage done by the use of performance enhancing drugs -- a blight for which the players and their union share responsibilities with the owners.
There is history to this pattern of denial. For years baseball operated as a legally-sanctioned monopoly: in 1922 the Supreme Court, in a decision by the other-wise revered Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, ruled that because baseball did not represent interstate commerce it was exempt from anti-trust laws. That ruling, baffling its reasoning, allowed the owners who ran the game to slip into an enduring state of lassitude and smugness. Yet even with its fall in popularity, with scandal, and strikes, the men who run the game seem incapable of seeing beyond the moment.
The wise course today, tomorrow at the latest, would be to make a full accounting of what happened before, to show what had gone wrong and what, in good measure, has been made right.
That, however, would mean a decision that would stand in marked contrast to what has come before. If baseball has a collective character it is expedience, and an eye to the short-term bottom line. To show boldness now would be the act of a different breed.
Alex Rodriguez has looked to the past and seen the impact it might have upon his own, damaged future. He has seen the public humiliation of Mark McGwire, the perjury case against Barry Bonds, the shame of Roger Clemens but also the redemption of Andy Pettitte, a pious man who may have cheated but who would not lie about it.
Baseball would be wise to follow that lead. But wisdom is a quality that the men who have run the game have struggled to exhibit.
Perhaps this, at long last, might be a good time to start.
(American public) DINGERS DINGERS DINGERS
_________________________________________________________
Miguel Tejeda is about to hauled before Congress for lying to them under oath. But as one wag on ESPN put it: "what's wrong with lying to Congress? They've been doing it to us forever."
The beauty (and curse) of baseball is that its history is stitched into the fabric of the U.S. It feels good to go to Fenway Park with my kids and know that my grandfather took my mom to the same place to watch Ted Williams 60 years ago. Baseball's soundrels and foibles have mirrored those of the country for over 100 years. I choose to be optimistic and view baseball as a canary in a coal mine. Mr. Shapiro notes baseball's shameful segregated era, but doesn't mention that Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier before the Johnson's Civil Rights Act and the end of Jim Crow. Maybe baseball can once again be ahead of the country.
Public money in sport venues talk the talk and walk the walk. If you feel that strongly about this issue, stop going to the games! MLB will listen.
If one player on a team uses steroids, that team is considered to have forfeited any games that player played. This is retroactive-has to be since the team could otherwise play the player than bench them once use was discovered-and applies to playoff games as well. Also, if a team qualified for a pennant, but would not after wins are turned into forfeits, they lose the pennant and it goes to the next team with a claim, example below.
So if team A from the western wins 100 games and become national league champs after beating first the central division champs, and then the eastern division, and then 42 of their wins become forfeits, it would work like this. The team with the highest number of wins after the discovery becomes western division champ. The eastern division champs become national league champs, and the central division IS credited a playoff win, even though it doesn't mean anything because they were eliminated first.
The objective of punishing the team is that team owners, managers, and fellow players will have incentive to not "look the other way."
...oh, and since it's retroactive include the last 3-4 decades too. Gosh your solution just makes so much darn sense. I can't see any reason why it's not already in place!
I wonder if Major League Baseball teams will conspire against A-Rod and not allow him to play baseball as they did Barry Bonds this year?
Oh...........I forgot. Barry Bonds is Black.
Bonds' Career Stats:
http://www.baseball-reference.com/b/bondsba01.shtml
Now, is he really worth $15 mil/year post-knee injury? I don't think so. He only played on '07 because San Fransiscans kept paying a lot of money to see him hit homers, but after only 59 in his last three seasons he couldn't even get a contract because of the crowd draw. It's not some conspiracy between teams--it's smart business sense. Even the Giants' owner knew he was trading [very] short-term profits for long-term team effectiveness when he signed Barry for '07.
Additionally, A-Rod's stats didn't really spike during his (known/admitted) period of use (http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20090210/sp_nm/us_baseball_rodriguez_performance_sb_1).
But it's not about steroids. Their actions post-revelation are also indicative of how they will be treated in the future; while A-Rod did deny, once it was reported he came clean almost immediately. Compare that to Bonds and Clemens, who continue to deny.
Actually the Clemens example completely kills your attempt at crying 'racism'. Clemens was infinitely more popular than Barry Bonds, yet he too was eviscerated publicly when he continued to deny sound allegations. Clemens's race? White. Non-minority, unlike A-Rod, if you didn't notice.
Daniel Weiner
www.goodgodforus.com