Baseball’s commissioner wants to retire with a victory, but he’s taking the wrong approach with PEDs
“The war to end all wars.”
“Peace in our time.”
And this: “The use of steroids and amphetamines amongst today’s players has greatly subsided and is virtually non-existent, as our testing results have shown. The so-called ‘steroid era’—a reference that is resented by the many players who played in that era and never touched the substances—is clearly a thing of the past.”
History tells us that those big, definitive pronouncements have a tendency to boomerang, that it’s always advisable to build in some wiggle room, to hedge a little bit, just in case.
But Bud Selig, the commissioner of Major League Baseball, must have skipped that class. In 2010, right after Mark McGwire’s tearful confession with Bob Costas, confirming what pretty much any sentient being had already concluded—that the St. Louis Cardinals’ home-run king had used performance-enhancing drugs—Selig issued the above statement declaring his sport clean, and therefore declaring victory.
Even if that were true, there remained all kinds of troubling questions regarding baseball’s tolerance of open, rampant amphetamine use for decades, and of the obliviousness and/or ignorance and/or remarkable naïveté of the sport’s hierarchy during the era of muscle-bound Popeyes, beginning with Oakland’s “Bash Brothers” in the late 1980s. Players, owners, union, media: Did any of them really deserve a pass for all those blind eyes turned during the Home Run Derby That Saved Baseball, during the years of miraculous physical transformations?
But the fact is, it wasn’t true. It couldn’t possibly be true.
And it all comes down to a simple cost/benefit equation: Drugs, legal or illegal, dangerous or benign, work, and the potential reward in professional sport is enormous. The science of performance enhancement is ever evolving, to the point where the ethical line between what is considered cheating and what is considered merely cutting-edge medicine has become very fine indeed (blood doping versus PRP injections, for instance), and even the most diligent and sophisticated testing regimen is doomed to lag several steps behind.
The BALCO scandal didn’t blow up because of anything discovered in a lab. It blew up because of a brown paper envelope dropped on a desk. Marion Jones, arguably the most tested athlete in history, wasn’t nabbed because her urine or blood betrayed her. They got her, like Al Capone, through her tax returns.
And this latest baseball scandal, the one that comes three years after the commissioner pronounced the game clean, began with a stack of shoddy, photocopied records, an alternative newspaper in Miami doing some very good, old-style investigative work, and with the sleazy operator of an anti-aging clinic rolling over when faced with a massive lawsuit from MLB—allegedly after his former client, Alex Rodriguez, failed to cough up some cash.
So here we go again, down the same old rabbit hole that last time around led to the Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens perjury trials. The results of those trials: 30 days of house arrest for Bonds (currently under appeal) for obstruction of justice after the jury failed to reach a verdict on the perjury charges, and a full acquittal for Clemens.
In this case, an arbitrator will likely have the final say if MLB attempts to suspend Rodriguez, Ryan Braun (the big target for Selig, because he beat a positive drug test after the sample had been mishandled, and has been especially vociferous in declaring his innocence) and company. If the commissioner does indeed shoot for double suspensions—100 games—because the players both allegedly used and lied about it, the players’ union will rightly consider that a provocation. And, really, what are the chances of making anything stick when the evidence comes down to the word of someone even less savoury than BALCO’s Victor Conte?
This war can’t be won—at least not this way. You can’t get ahead of science and you can’t defeat human nature. It’s not like the annual, sanctimonious Hall of Fame debate. You can’t make something that is grey black-and-white purely by declaration.
Yep, the other path is tricky: education; research; regulation rather than punishment; shining a bright light on all of sports science, dragging it out from behind the closed doors of “clinics” like the one in Miami; understanding where the real health risks lie and which are simply convenient scare stories; removing the moral element—unless you’re also willing to tackle the truth that the baseball card heroes of your youth were popping greenies like candy. (If that sounds a bit like the decriminalization of marijuana, well… yeah.)
That’s not where baseball is headed, though. Instead, it’s headed for another round of show trials.
And who’d be surprised to hear the commissioner declaring, as he heads out the door to a promised retirement in 2014:
“Mission accomplished.”
This story originally appeared in Sportsnet magazine. Subscribe here.