Lawmakers Want MLB to Fix Steroid Woes

If the league isn't willing to do it (and I want to give them every effort and opportunity to do so voluntarily), I don't see the harm. If we're giving baseball an anti-trust exemption, we might as well make them pay for it.

 

Baseball's not going to police itself. The Player's Union is too powerful. In my world we'd revoke MLB's anti-trust exemption and strike the names Bonds, McGuire, and Sosa from the record books.

It won't happen, and to be honest I don't really care, but my young son is a fan, so I hope Bud Selig grows a spine and tries to clean up the game.

 

McGuire took Andro. A perfectly legal substance at the time in baseball and legally. Obviously baseball I believe has now prohibited it. Sosa allegedly took steroids, however, I have yet to see any definitive proof (only very circumstantial proof when one compares the monster years in the past with his very average post testing year this year). Bonds and Giambi are the only two people who took illegal drugs in an attempt to benefit their stats. In my mind, they should both be banned from baseball immediately. Period. You can't really "undo" the stats. But I would damn well make sure that Hammerin Hank's record stays intact by kicking Bonds out of baseball for life.

To Mr. McCain and the rest of the Senate,

Get it done. The sooner the better.

 

Andro was useless. It was one of the first-generation pre-cursors -- however it was about as androgenic as some of those "natural male enhancers" on the market. It also was naturally occuring in nature. It qualified under the DSHEA because it was found, in all places, in tree bark.

For what? This was Grand Jury testimony that was leaked! Aren't Grand Jury proceedings supposed to be closed/sealed? If so, any information was illegally obtained!

 

Screw 'em. The only reason I go to baseball games anymore is to waste away a Saturday afternoon in a drunken haze.

The owners are ambivalent about drug testing because the only thrill in the game these days is watching lab experiments like Bonds try and launch one for Europe; take that away and you have 6 hour pitching duels (zzzzz).

 

McGuire took steroids. My brother played in the minor leagues for four years, reaching Triple A. He said just about everybody's on the stuff, especially in the minor leagues, which MLB has claimed to have cleaned up.

 

Exactly. Look at the NL and AL All Star teams for the past 5 years. You're looking at steroid users, virtually every freakin' one of them.

 

This is nice, but isn't there stuff to do that matters?

 

A muli-billion dollar industry that promises "sport" (i.e. fair competition) that has an anti-trust exemption matters when it doesn't expect its employees to conduct themselves in accordance with the laws of the country.

 

Good post.

 

Not even Poland?

 

The other baseball "secret" that Conte says no one talks about is that 80% of b-ball players (his guess-timate) take stimulants before a game. If you don't you're playing "naked" as they say. Giambi ALWAYS looked he was a big-time tweaker. His eyes darted around like a ferret when they showed him in the dugout.

Oh yeah - how the hell do NBA players get to be the size of football linemen nowadays?

 

Baseball was an important part of our culture. It no longer has that magical hold it did when the baby boomers were young, now its just another industry full of liars and cheats. Congress needs to fix so many other things before it even touches this, things that have an impact on the entire country not just people who happen to care for a specific sport.

 

Threatening to take away Baseball's anti-trust exemption unless it immediately institutes aggressive steroid testing doesn't require inter-partisan debate, multiple revisions of bills, or anywhere near the difficulty and resources that solving all these 'other' problems requires.

 

Gotcha, so it should only be done because it is easy.

 

It's important to a lot of people and it's low hanging fruit--aside from the fact that it's the correct thing to do.

 

One problem is that the drug is not taken seriously by the DEA, who doesn't go after dealers, and even when it does catch one lets them go with a slap on the wrist.

http://www.espn.go.com/gen/s/2000/1207/929678.html