|
|
From Scoop # 55 January 17, 2008
Mehring on
Baseball’s Mitchell Report The Mitchell Report, blah blah steroids, blah blah performance enhancers, blah blah big names, blah blah any and all efforts. Not to make light of the efforts of Senator George Mitchell and his investigation, but my eyes glaze over whenever a blue-ribbon panel churns out a tome the size of the Green Bay phone book and manages to point out the obvious. Do you realize that baseball players used performance enhancing drugs? Well, you do now. To baseball’s credit, they have a link to the entire Mitchell Report on their website (http://mlb.mlb.com/mlb/news/mitchell/report.jsp). From there you can jump to any number of sections: Early Indications of Steroids in Baseball 1988 to August 1998; Operation Equine; or Major League Baseball and the BALCO investigation. But, I don’t want to focus this piece on what has happened. I would like to focus instead on what should happen. The Mitchell report is a good first step. In I, Claudius, the aged Emperor Claudius realizes that things must get worse before they get better. He says the following line: Let all the poisons that lurk in the mud hatch out. For a true healing in baseball, all the poisons must be hatched out. The true scope of the Steroid Age in baseball will probably never be known, but as full an accounting as possible must be made. Secondly, the culture of baseball must change. I’ll bet you thought that I was going to write More Education. How much more education can there be? The reason that athletes are willing to take a chance on using performance enhancers is that they work. They may knock 10 or 15 years off your life and give you a head the size of The Great Pumpkin. But as long as you hit 50 homers and get a 3-year contract for a total of $22 million guaranteed, is another class about the dangers of performance enhancing drugs going to make you think twice? No, the culture must change. Players who used P.E.D.s took jobs away from players who didn’t. Dan Naulty, a former Minnesota Twin and New York Yankee stated this as a fact in an article in the Rocky Mountain News (http://www.rockymountainnews.com/news/2007/dec/21/past-catches-up-to-anabolic-prospect/), “I stole people’s jobs.” At the end of the article, Naulty expanded on his thought, “I didn't do this right. I cheated. I screwed people. I lied. I did everything you possibly could do all for the sake of money and potential fame. That's not a good thing." Players who are clean need to stand up to those who aren’t. Management has to stop rewarding players who get ahead with P.E.D.s. Those steps shouldn’t be hard, but they will be and they must be taken. However, those steps won’t be possible until there is real testing and a real policy in place. This won’t be possible until the owners and the player’s union reach an agreement. For two sides that Babe Ruth was a left-handed hitter, this step may take a while. I listened very briefly to the Congressional hearings on Tuesday and what follows may be a bit out of context, but Don Fehr of the union made a good point about Human Growth Hormone. On the flight to Washington, the Continental in-flight magazine had an ad in it that promoted the benefits of HGH. How can an athlete pass on using something that is going to maximize his talent and his earnings? I’ll be honest. Every month, I go to GNC and pick up a few supplements: A little something to help burn fat and a little something for my health. There is also something else to make sure I get my recommended daily allowance of vegetables without having to peel carrots every night. Players on the Timber Rattlers are told not to get supplements from GNC and also to stay away from shakes at certain gyms we go to on the road because there is no way of knowing if there is a banned substance in there or not. Not that I could ever hit 50 homers in a season, but I wonder if I would pass a test. I wonder if baseball will pass this test. I want to believe that it will. But, still I wonder.
|
|