I can’t tell you that I’m shocked that the Major League Baseball Players Union leadership still hasn’t gotten the message – America wants its game cleaned up, we want the steroid era to end and not to see this scandal swept under the rug. That’s not a hard message to understand, but the Union once again is playing obstructionist games with the steroid probe lead by former Senator Mitchell.
It’s bad enough that Mitchell actually has no power to compel anyone to talk to him and has no means of punishing anyone who refuses to talk, but what the Player’s Union has done is give a gag order to its members effectively assuring that the investigators get stonewalled time and time again. That has been the Union policy in regards to steroids from day one. They didn’t want testing, they didn’t want punishments, and they don’t want the truth to see the light of day. There is a reason for that. They are fearful that the truth would only hurt the player’s negotiating power when it comes to creating the new Collective Bargaining Agreement.
The excuse the Union uses is that the probe goes beyond the scope of the investigation as set forth by Bud Selig. That’s simply not true. When Selig first set this mockery of an investigation in motion he told both the fans and Senator Mitchell that Mitchell had the power to follow this investigation wherever it might lead but that what baseball was concerned with was possible steroid use after 1992. That leeway was left so that senator could follow whatever leads he might discover in order to learn about the history of steroid use and uncover for proof of malfeasance as well as the users, vendors and cheaters involved in tainting the sport of baseball.
Clearly the former Senator has been following that path, despite the limitations his investigation has been hampered with. The MLBPA (Players Union) was happy so long as they believed that the investigation was a lame duck and that it could go nowhere without cooperation of players and insiders in the game – cooperation they believed senator Mitchell could never get. His requests for medical and phone records, and his plan to interview active players now have them up in arms. They are afraid that it will lead to the truth coming out.
And the truth they fear can only hurt them. Players, especially superstars are the drawing cards of Major League Baseball, and the more stars revealed to have been using steroids before the ban the worse their claims for larger shares of revenue are – and the more stringent drug testing is likely to end up being, even if Congress fails to force stronger testing methods.
Yet this isn’t about the Union, or the players, or even the management who turned a blind eye to steroids. It’s about the details of cheating, of tarnishing the game, and about punishing those in violation of MLB’s drug policy over the last two seasons. It shouldn’t matter if the player involved was Barry Bonds or someone from the lowest rung of the minor league system and we’ve never heard of them. What it boils down to is that the fans deserve a fair game, if not in terms of revenue spent, than at least in terms of making sure that team chemistry is an intangible, not a pharmaceutical matter.
