"All that is old and already formed can continue to live only if it allows within itself the conditions of a new beginning."
Note to Baseball:
Ban the BumsPosted 6:14 p.m., Dec. 9, 2004
| If Major League Baseball really wants to get rid of the problem of performance-enhancing chemistry that is shredding the greatest game there is only one answer. Ban offenders, permanently, regardless how large their muscles, how lucrative their gate draw, or how monumental their records.
It's been true over the last 140 years or so that bans on players, coaches, owners and even one umpire--in 1882--have mostly involved gambling and gamblers. That includes the brief ban against Yankees owner George Steinbrenner, after he paid known gambler Howie Spira $40,000 to dig up dirt on Dave Winfield to get out from under Winfield's hefty contract. Steinbrenner, unfortunately, was later reinstated.
Gambling was the scourge of baseball in the first two decades of the 20th Century, the 1919 Black Sox debacle being only the most notorious case. It recurred occasionally later in the century, most prominently when all-time hits leader Pete Rose was banned for betting on baseball in 1989. But it was only with the rise of dictator-like commissioner Kennesaw Mountain Landis--whose rulings were not always completely just, but were decisive--that the game was largely cleaned up, enabling it to survive its greatest crisis.
To paraphrase Simon and Garfunkel, where have you gone, Mountain Landis?
The Drug Ban
It's instructive to the case at hand to recall that not all MLB bans have involved gambling. An important precedent--one that should have ramifications to the steroids scandal today--was set in 1980.
That year, eventual Hall of Fame pitcher Ferguson Jenkins was "permanently suspended" after being arrested for possession of illegal drugs in Toronto. Commissioner Bowie Kuhn acted decisively, ousting Jenkins 14 days after his arrest. However, in an unprecedented move, an arbitrator, Raymond Goetz, reinstated Jenkins.
It was the first time that an arbitrator ever overruled a commissioner, and from this distance, it appears to have contributed to the permanent weakening of the office's authority. Today, we're left with "disinterested" Commissioner Bud Selig, a former team owner whose actual separation from the Milwaukee Brewers has often been questioned.
Possibly the 1980 reversal in the Jenkins case was intended as a check on Kuhn, who had steadfastly championed the owners' right to maintain its system of indentured servitude--known as the reserve clause--in the era prior to free agency.
Whatever the case, the reversal of Kuhn's order wasn't the only ominous portent of the Jenkins affair. That December, the pitcher was convicted of cocaine possession by a Canadian court. But the case's judge, citing Jenkins' years of "exemplary conduct"--right, just tell that to Don Zimmer--immediately overturned the judgment.
It was an early lesson that modern pro athletes are above the law, provided they attain sufficient star status.
But it is Steve Howe, a flame-throwing pitcher who broke in with great promise with the Dodgers in 1983, who provides the penultimate case in point. After years in and out of drug treatment for cocaine addiction, Commissioner Fay Vincent banned Howe from the game for life after he failed an aftercare program in 1992. But again, an arbitrator reinstated a drug-addled star ballplayer, this time after making the incredible argument that Howe needed cocaine to overcome his attention deficit disorder.
The point of this little history lesson is to demonstrate that there is precedent in baseball of banning players based on use of illegal drugs--despite the intervention of arbitration authorities. Remember, steroids are illegal, even if baseball was slow to ban them. And if union rules and arbitrators stand in the way of doing what's right for the game and the public, then perhaps there needs to be another angle of attack.
Enter John McCain.
"I don't want to intervene in a management-union issue. I hate to do it. I threatened them last March, and they didn't do anything. I don't know what choice we have unless we act now."
-- Sen. John McCain,
USA Today, Dec. 6, 2004
The Blackmail Option
Here's my suggestion for a tack that the senator should take: Blatant extortion.
Baseball has long held fast to a federal antitrust exemption that it plainly has no real right to, but which has effectively kept the game safe from the reach of politicians for the last century. It's most important application has been to forbid owners from moving their teams without the agreement of all of Major League Baseball. That's why Barry Bonds team doesn't play in St. Petersburg, Fla., today.
But what has in the past been a golden cane for owners may now become a kind of useful Damocles' sword for public policy leaders.
Here's my proposal, which may be perfectly illegal but strikes me as the only way that I can imagine this problem will be cleared up, once and for all.
Require that any player be banned for life if he is found through a valid investigation to have used steroids, human growth hormone, female fertility drugs or anything else meant to chemically enhance their musculature, healing capacity or performance. Newspaper accounts of leaked grand jury testimony, however accurate, probably shouldn't count. But the courts will have their say in this Giambi/Bonds business soon enough.
You got me right--an outright ban, congressionally mandated, without fear of interference either from entertainment attorneys (let's face it, the players' counsel aren't really labor lawyers in any meaningful sense) or from wayward arbitrators.
That's the tong. Here's the hammer: Failure to either enact or enforce this proviso would result in the immediate revocation of baseball's antitrust exemption.
I hear what you're saying. Won't work. The players won't go along with it, because it's nothing to them if the owners lose the antitrust exemption. They might actually like playing in Mexico City. Plus, they've already got free agency, so they have little to lose. That's just fine. But if the player's don't go along with mandatory, random, monthly tests--in season and off-season--and if they fight the lifetime ban proviso, the owners would have no choice but simply to lock them out.
I know what that could mean. I remember 1994. But it is wrong what is happening with juiced-up athletes. They not only make a mockery of the wonderful, generation-spanning, all-American competition of baseball, but are pushing high school and college athletes to steroids use as surely as the Beatles led their more vulnerable fans to LSD.
... And the Fans Shrugged
It does seem true that most fans don't care if players are artificially enhanced. But a lot of people also don't care that professional wrestling is nothing more than a kind of Americanized kabuki theater. Which is rapidly what baseball is becoming. Only potentially deadlier. Think Lyle Alzado. Or Ken Caminiti.
I understand that Caminiti died from an overdose--but just how wide do you think is the street that separates a man's desire to inject himself with a substance that gives him a greater sense of power and prowess, and another man's desire to jab a needle into his arm to feel heroin's freight-train rush? Do you think it is not possible Caminiti's death is in some way linked to the habit he developed while re-sculpting his body into that of a comic-book superhero?
There are even those who worry that steroids represent dangers on the field. The veteran pitcher Kenny Rogers reportedly told his wife a few years ago to prepare a lawsuit against Major League Baseball if he is struck and killed by a line-drive propelled by one of these needle-jabbing, cream-glooping, clear-gel-swilling Spidermen.
Some deny that this is a crisis, fashioning it is a mere embarrassment. But why would anyone imagine that throwing a World Series to gamblers in one year (1919) constitutes a greater travesty than handing an immortal record like Hank Aaron's home run championship--the most famous, most notable achievement in all sport--to someone who has bought and paid for the pharmacological, bioengineered fountain of youth?
Is there anyone left who believes that illegal chemicals are not the sole reason that Barry Bonds has hit more home runs after age 35--the age that the human body naturally begins to lose muscle mass--than Roger Maris, a two-time American League MVP, hit in his entire career?
This is a crisis in baseball, whether fans or sports-media sycophants appreciate it or not.
MLB has to decide now, once and for all, whether it means to be the bat-wielding version of the World Wrestling Federation or if it wants to be a beautiful game--the lone sport in which men of average physique but surpassing skill can compete. And if that takes another lockout to get there, so be it.
It just may be necessary to kill this game in order to save it.
-- Kevin Featherly
