Don’t take great stock in baseball’s new drug policy;
at this point it is more about public relations than about real
reform. Of course that’s par for the course anytime that
the MLBPA and owners get together to work out anything. One side
asks for the moon, the other for the stars. This time was a little
different though, it wasn’t about millionaires fighting with
billionaires for a bigger piece of the pie - it was about us,
the American public, saying that if baseball wouldn’t clean
up its own mess that we were going to ask the government to do
it.
So what did we get for all our pressure? A drug policy that is
the best that Major League Baseball has ever had, but one that
is laughably weaker than anything put on a court, field, arena
or ice surface anywhere else in the professional world. It was
a compromise forced on the leaders of the Player’s Union
who as recently as a month ago were claiming that the previous
policy or lack thereof, was enough to keep the game clean.
The Grand Jury testimony in the BALCO hearings put lie to that
claim. The game hasn’t been clean it has been dirty, very
dirty, and it surprised not just the fans but quite a few of the
players as well. They came forward en masse and told the Union
Leaders to renegotiate the CBA (Collective Bargaining Agreement)
to include a real drug policy.
Once again the union leaders took that to mean that they should
concede as little as possible, make as big a media splash as they
could, and keep any drug policy as toothless as possible. They
did just that. The drug policy, while an improvement is still
the weakest in professional or Olympic sports and skirts many
important issues while offering little more than a slap on the
wrist for offenders.
Let’s take a look at some of the weaknesses in this policy:
The biggest omissions in the policy were a complete absence of
testing for amphetamines or "pep pills" which can be
used to enhance performance or testing for any type of recreational
drugs. While plenty of people don’t care about the recreational
drugs, amphetamines can still skew the balance of power on the
playing field which should be of concern - and it is everywhere
but in the world of major league baseball.
After that comes another big omission - the lack of a blood testing
policy, even for those who have tested positive in previous urine
tests. The fact is that steroids, especially designer steroids
are very hard to detect and are often designed to fool tests,
especially urine tests. Urine tests can also be fooled by such
low tech things like using clean urine, which can be obtained
from a friend or can even be found for sale on the internet along
with dozens of other cheats available to fool either the tests
or their administrators. Testing over the last few years has become
a technological battlefield between the makers of designer steroids
and laboratories that test for them. The drug makers usually have
the upper hand and get paid big dollars by their athlete clients
for products like “the Clear” which are supposed to
be undetectable on certain types of tests.
Next comes the testing policy itself. Every player can be tested
without notice once during each calendar year in season or out
no matter where they are, but only once specifically, even with
strong suspicion or evidence showing steroid use, or even a previous
positive test! Aside from the single specific test that baseball
is allowed to administer to each player, MLB can conduct an unlimited
number of random checks which may or may not be unannounced. While
we all hope that random testing will clean up the game the question
begs to be asked - what good is random testing of the players
if it’s not always unannounced? Of course why we can’t
test those that fail the test more often than randomly is of serious
concern as well.
The punishment phase of the policy is ridiculously light too,
again, lighter than that in any other sport. Any sports writer
or pundit who says otherwise is yanking our chain or deceiving
themselves. I’ve already seen two of them try to justify
it by using the amount of money a player might lose during a 10
day suspension without pay. It’s irrelevant how much money
it would cost the player, especially if they are playing out a
contract that pays them far beyond what they would have made without
performance enhancing drugs. In football a positive test costs
an offender 4 games for the first offense - that’s 25% of
a season and it gives teams incentive to keep their players clean.
The Olympics suspends an offender for TWO YEARS! By comparison
a baseball player stupid enough to test positive will on average
miss 9 games. Less than 1/16th of a season and he incurs
no additional testing - so is essentially in the clear until the
next season unless his name comes up for a random test.
With over 1200 active players that’s not terribly likely,
nor is this policy likely to stop the smartest of steroid users.
Funny thing, most stars are reasonably smart, but there are enough
stupid guys who’ll test positive to allow Bug Selig and Donald
Fehr to trumpet the success of the drug testing policy no matter
what happens.
Selig and Fehr could have given us a game that was totally above
reproach and they could have served as an example to the best
in athletics, but instead they have thrown us nothing more than
a public relations bone, dressing up the policy in the finest
of the emperor’s new clothes.
