At Home Plate - Baseball still has Drug Problem

At Home Plate

Written by Jonathan Leshanski (Contact & Archive) on May 11, 2009

You could look at this week’s exposure of Manny Ramirez and the subsequent 50 game ban as a triumph for Major League Baseball. After all, almost universally MLB’s ability to police itself when it came to performance enhancing drugs was decried by both media and other professional sports organizations (namely WADA the World Anti-Doping Agency and the IOC) all of whom wanted a transparent system. Yet, while baseball may have gained a modicum of credibility when it came to the exposure and suspension of players, it’s obviously failed when it come to dealing with the big picture when it comes to baseball and PEDs.

Despite what Bud Selig might say, the game is far from being clean.

Photo by rickyrhodes, used under creative commons license.

Sadly we’ve become jaded when it comes to players and PEDs. Not terribly many of us were shocked by the revelation that Manny was using a banned substance, nor by the fact that A-Rod had been using since high school, not just during a brief stint in Texas (not to mention tipping pitches in exchange for tipped pitches in return). That’s exactly what baseball has missed -- that perhaps the two most recognized faces in the game are still being associated with steroids today, and that even having the (and I quote) “Most stringent drug policy of any major professional sport” hasn’t stopped the big names from either lying about or taking PEDS.

And if the stars of the game are getting away with it, you can bet the lesser known are getting away with it too. At a Mothers Day gathering yesterday in a room full of sports fans the most optimistic of us guessed that the current PED use was down from somewhere between 40%-60% at the peak of the steroids era to a mere 20% or so today. While that is an improvement, it still is a staggering number of people.

Yet, many of us have grown so numb when it comes to this issue that it seems almost a tolerable number.   Yet how would we feel if 20% of the children in your kid’s school cheated on admission tests? Or 20% of your friends did a shot of whiskey before they drove home? Or 20% was cut off of your salary?   None of us would find that acceptable, so why do we tolerate it in professional sports?

Perhaps because we accept that professional sports are different from amateur sports. When we learned how to play, or taught our children, we learned and taught good sportsmanship and lived by a motto of do your best and instilled the values that a game should be both fair and honest.   Those certainly aren’t values that have thrived at the Major League level. No, baseball has seen spitballs, corked bats, gambling, fixed games, sharpened spikes, dirty takeouts, beanballs, hidden ball plays, unbelievable degrees of profanity and vulgar behavior not to mention unsportsmanlike conduct and PEDs.

Over the years baseball has crushed most of that. AL president Ban Johnson cleaned up a lot of the profanity and dirty tricks. Commissioner Kennesaw Mountain Landis came down hard on game fixers, banning eight men from the game for supposedly throwing the 1919 World Series. Bart Giamatti banned Pete Rose for gambling on baseball. Bud Selig has attempted to come down on the PED users.

But the truth is that baseball, and other professional sports, will always have a degree of cheating -- especially when big money is at stake. Some players want to have an edge, to reach the levels of their bonuses, and some players want to have an edge just so they can win.

It’s the commissioner’s job to fight that -- to keep the playing field as level as possible when it comes to cheating. It’s something baseball has failed to do until recently when it’s come to PEDs, until recently when it rammed the current drug policy down the throat of the representatives of the MLBPA, who fought it despite public, political and player desire to see steroids gone from the game.

The sad thing is they’ve still failed. One of the faces of baseball, perhaps the most recognizable face of baseball, Manny Ramirez (who my 15 month old daughter recognizes on the screen) was caught cheating.   Alex Rodriguez, who up until a few weeks ago was considered to possibly be one of the all time greats, was exposed as a cheater and a liar (not to mention a pitch tipper) when it came to steroids.

Clearly the problems still exist.

Call me a hardliner, but I’m sick of writing about steroids, PEDs and the cheaters who use them.   Baseball needs to take a tougher stand -- costing a player 50 games worth of salary, by suspending them for a positive test means nothing when players make the kind of salaries that they do.

A tougher approach is needed against all sorts of cheating from tipping pitches to the opposition (which essentially could be used to fix a game), to the use of PEDs, to lying about it. That’s something MLB desperately needs to address, either by employing the two-year ban favored by the IOC or by a lifetime ban from the game.

Clearly what they’ve got right now isn’t working well enough.

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