ESPN’s Outside the Lines is reporting that 20 ballplayers are about to face punishment from Major League Baseball because of their alleged connection to a “Miami-area clinic at the heart of an ongoing performance-enhancing drug scandal.” The players include former MVPs Alex Rodriguez and Ryan Braun and would be part of what ESPN said could be “the largest in American sports history.”
Tony Bosch, founder of the now-shuttered Biogenesis of America, reached an agreement this week to cooperate with MLB’s investigation, two sources told “Outside the Lines,” giving MLB the ammunition officials believe they need to suspend the players.
One source familiar with the case said the commissioner’s office might seek 100-game suspensions for Rodriguez, Braun and other players, the penalty for a second doping offense. The argument, the source said, is the players’ connection to Bosch constitutes one offense, and previous statements to MLB officials denying any such connection or the use of PEDs constitute another.
The news is a sad day for baseball, and not just because it gives the game another “steroid” scandal at a time when it appeared to be recovering from earlier ones. It also continues the selective approach the league has taken to justice as it makes its stars the bad guys when ownership has been as complicit, turning a blind eye during the height of the steroid era.
The history provides the context. Baseball’s owner-triggered 1994 shutdown was followed by a couple of leans attendance years even as fans were being given a chance to watch some outstanding baseball. Everyone talks about the Yankee teams of the late-90s, but the Braves and Indians fielded some outstanding ballclubs as well.
Then, in 1998, four years after the lock-out, Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa traded homeruns, chasing and then erasing a 37-yearold homerun record that was supposed to be unbreakable. The homerun was king — as the Tom Glavine-Gregg Maddux TV commercial claimed, “Chicks dig the long ball.”
Homeruns made the owners money in attendance and through TV ratings and they made hitters rich, as well. And owners worked to ensure the trend would continue, with smaller parks, tighter strike zones and the tacit approval of whatever it was that these homerun hitters were doing.
Throughout, there was whispering and even loud shouting, but the league and the players did little more than nod and make empty promises — even as the whispers grew louder (a Sports Illustrated cover story on former MVP Ken Caminiti in 2002 detailed his steroid use and accusations that the use was widespread and Jose Canseco’s accusations in 2005). In 2006, the league acted undertaking an internal investigation into performance-enhancing drug use among players that stopped short of examining a larger league culture that, as I said, tacitly encouraged the drug-fueled power spree.
In the wake of the investigation, the league instituted a new testing regime and got religion on the drug issue. But in declaring its own war on performance-enhancing drugs, the league is making the same mistakes that local, state and federal authorities have made in attempting to curtail illegal drug use. It has made it about crime and punishment, which ensures failure.
This is why Dave Zirin’s suggestion is worth considering:
Steroids and all PEDs need to be seen as an issue of public health not crime and punishment. If seen as an issue of public health, the scandal here would not be that a group of players may have used PEDs. The scandal would be that they had to visit a skuzzy, unregulated “clinic” not run by medical professionals to get their drugs. Instead of criminalization, educate all players about the harmful effects of long-term PED use when not under a doctor’s supervision. Have medical officials make the policy and determine what PEDs help a person heal faster – an admirable quality in a medicine, no? – and what shouldn’t be a part of any training regimen. Centralize distribution under the umbrella of MLB so it doesn’t become an arms race of which teams get the best doctors and the best drugs. Then, players could take advantage of the most effective new medicines and MLB would be removing the process out of the shadows where the Tony Bosch-types of the world hold sway. They also then have an ethical basis for testing and rehabilitation when use crosses the line into abuse.
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Hank Kalet 