PERCEPTIONS By Steve Feitl: Baseball needs to cut off steroid scandal now.
By: Steve Feitl
It’s the second week of March and temperatures have started inching north. Thoughts of spring are inevitable, and with that comes images of baseball. In a little more than a month, the Major League Baseball season will begin. Spanning from April to October, the long season is usually a baseball fan’s dream.
But in 2004, it could turn out to be a seven-month nightmare.
Already, the spring training fervor over the Yankees’ acquisition of Alex Rodriguez has been overshadowed by the relentless onslaught of the news reports of the steroids scandal in baseball.
The latest bombshell exploded in San Francisco last week when the San Francisco Chronicle reported that government officials believe Barry Bonds, Jason Giambi, Gary Sheffield and four other professional athletes received steroids and human growth hormones from the Bay Area Laboratory Co-Operative (BALCO) the center of a federal steroid-distribution indictment.
It effectively ended months of finger-pointing and denials throughout the baseball world. Players like Bonds and Sheffield dared reporters to test them knowing the players union would never allow such an action. Managers such as Chicago Cubs skipper Dusty Baker compared the speculation to McCarthyism, while players like Turk Wendell and John Smoltz began to break rank and question their fellow players’ actions.
Most of it is moot now that we have definitive names. There still may not be concrete proof that any of the aforementioned players are guilty of anything more than choosing unfortunate training associates. But the circumstantial evidence is getting out of hand and in the public’s eye, the damage is now done.
A part of me doesn’t fully understand the growing outrage over the issue. It’s not that I don’t think there’s a steroid problem in baseball. I do. It’s not that I don’t think it’s bad for baseball. I do. I just don’t think it’s anything new.
I didn’t need a government leak or a ridiculously vague testing program to tell me steroids are a baseball problem. Once average players started entering home run races and great players started becoming immortals late in their careers, I had a real good idea. I suspect other baseball fans had figured it out as well.
But now the general public has caught on.
If we learned anything from the hysteria over the Janet Jackson "wardrobe malfunction" at the Super Bowl, it’s that it only takes one "regrettable" incident to cause a groundswell of public outcry. Howard Stern has been smutty for years, but one Jackson breast and now radio stations can’t get the talk show host off their stations soon enough. The entertainment industry faces a different set of rules than it did two months ago.
Major League Baseball may soon be able to relate. The Olympics have weathered performance-enhancing drug scandals, as has professional wrestling. One only comes around every four years and the other resides on the fringe of mainstream entertainment. Neither is the national pastime. MLB is held to a higher standard and can’t take seven months worth of the media scrutiny it’s receiving right now. The game will lose the faith of the people who support it, and that’s tough to regain.
But the fix to this problem is simple and within reach. The owners and players union need to get together this month and iron an effective steroid testing policy prior to opening day one that shows the public that the sport takes this matter seriously.
The current plan in place only after 5 percent to 7 percent of random, anonymous test results came back positive in 2003 calls for treatment after a first infraction and one-year suspension after five positive tests. Compare that to the Olympics’ policy of a minimum two-year ban for first offense and lifetime ban for the second offense. MLB’s plan pales in comparison.
There are many reasons for baseball players to get clean. Steroids skew records and statistics. Steroids dissolve the integrity of the game. Steroids may cause long-term health problems. Steroids send a terrible and troubling message to young baseball fans learning the game on Little League fields throughout the country. If nothing else, steroids are illegal and the federal government seems to have professional sports in its cross hairs.
But the best reason of all is that the American people those who subsidize those enormous professional sports salaries and profits won’t tolerate it anymore.
The sport needs to stop the bleeding now. The tourniquet is within reach. It’s up to the owners and players union to tie the knot.
Steve Feitl is the managing editor of The Lawrence Ledger. He can be reached at [email protected].