http://www.msnbc.com/news/995824.asp?0ql=c9p




MLB making fatal mistake
COMMENTARY
Baseball doesn't understand that the jig is up. When five to seven percent
of its players tested positive for record-enhancing steroids, commissioner
Bud Selig acted as if it was a victory for his sport. What is he, nuts?
WHAT THAT NUMBER of positive tests proved was two things: There are cheaters
under Selig's watch that are turning baseball's most cherished records into
a mockery, and baseball players are not the brightest bulbs in the box.
The players who were tested had four months to cleanse their systems from
drugs that can be masked more easily than a five-year-old on Halloween. As
the Olympics drug police learned a long time ago, the people developing
performance-enhancing drugs are far ahead of the people trying to block
their usage.
They develop new cocktails of steroids and human growth hormones, they
baffle the drug police by developing masking agents that make the testing
process difficult, and they make new designer drugs like
tetrahydrogestrinone (THG), which has forced officials to create a new test
to even detect it.
Simply put, if that many players tested positive, they weren't trying to
hide it.
"The results shouldn't have been that high when you consider how easy it is
to circumvent the tests and that they knew (the tests) were coming,'' Penn
State University professor Charles Yesalis told the Boston Globe.
Baseball remains in fear of two things as the steroid scandal in sports
continues to grow. One is the book by long-time slugger Jose Canseco. The
former MVP received an estimated $1 million advance for the tell-all, in
which he promises to reveal how steroids are abused in baseball and may even
name names of some of the biggest stars (like himself) who used them.
Second, baseball fears what will come out of the BALCO investigation in
which two of baseball's biggest sluggers -- San Francisco's Barry Bonds and
New York Yankee and former MVP Jason Giambi -- have been subpoenaed to
testify. They are just two of a plethora of other baseball, football and
track and field athletes.
That investigation is more a tax case than a steroid case -- it was launched
by the Internal Revenue Service -- but it may strike at the heart of steroid
abuse in professional sports, and baseball in particular. If it exposes
someone such as Bonds, who is arguably the game's greatest slugger and a
six-time Most Valuable Player, as a cheat, the sport will be rocked to its
foundations like it hasn't been since the 1919 Black Sox scandal that
questioned the outcome of the World Series.
And that's something the league can't have.
Major League Baseball is no different than pro football or the NBA. It has
no real interest in catching its players doing something that will question
its players honesty. As many long-time anti-drug workers have already said,
baseball's proposed testing is little more than a thinly veiled facade, a
public relations effort to mask what could become a public relations
nightmare. It would be a betrayal of the hard work players from past eras
gave.
Baseball, more than any other sport, feeds off nostalgia and history. No
sport talks more about its past than baseball and no sport makes more money
off of it. So if the records set today by people such as Bonds, Sammy Sosa,
Mark McGwire (an admitted andro user, although in his defense, it was not
illegal to do so) become tainted, the game will suffer a stain difficult if
not impossible to remove.
It's one thing to slap an asterisk by Roger Maris' single-season record of
61 home runs because he played more games than Babe Ruth. It's quite another
to put a syringe by today's records because they were achieved by players
using drugs.
Even Players Association leader Gene Orza admitted this week that if the
game is found to have any where near the percentage of steroid users and
abusers Canseco and Ken Caminiti claim -- somewhere between 20 percent and
40 percent -- "it would mean the records are tainted.''
No, Gene, it would mean the game is tainted. Your game as well as Selig's.
It would be a game dirtied by performance enhancing drugs that have
artificially created records for which players have been paid artificially
stimulated salaries, as Boston Red Sox club president Larry Lucchino has
said.
The kind of half step measures presently approved by the players union and
major league baseball only guarantee that the only players caught will be
ones with no sense. And that means the men and women who run the game and
are responsible for its history and its legitimacy also have no sense.
If the sport is found to have created new interest and new records through
the use of new types of steroids like THG, than no amount of public
relations work can repair the damage.
Unless it does one thing:
Baseball can survive a steroid scandal involving even its biggest stars if
it shows it is taking real measures to prevent cheating.
Can cheating ever be totally removed? No, because it is generally (although
not always) still individuals rather than organizations who choose to cheat.
Each competitor is responsible for what he or she puts inside her body and
for what its ingestion creates.
But if baseball, and all sports, want to retain legitimacy in the eyes of
the public, the people in charge of the games these athletes play must do
all they can to catch the ones willing to sell their reputations and
sacrifice their very souls for a few lines in a record book.
That it has come to this is sad. If America's Pastime tries harder to sweep
the growing use of performance enhancing drugs under the table rather than
taking out the trash it will be sadder still because the stench, in the end,
will not be simply that of phony records.
It will be the stench of a sport rotting away at its very foundation -- the
belief that what they tell us and what they show us is real, not something
created in a chemistry lab.
Ron Borges writes regularly for NBCSports.com and covers the NFL and boxing
for the Boston Globe.

MSNBC Terms, Conditions and Privacy ©2003



[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]