Yahoo! Sports – MLB – Sanchez won’t appeal suspension
I’m not out for blood in this steroid thing, but I think those that say they’re coming clean should actually come clean. The commissioner and many players in baseball have said that being suspended and publicly outed was the big punishment, but with Alex Sanchez’s 10-day suspension for a drug that he isn’t naming but is saying was legal when he bought it, all the maneuvering has been to find wiggle room.
Maybe that reflects the expansive gray area that each individual case was built upon, but if we’re going to endure the hysterics of those crying for PED blood, we need to offer up a less heinous alternative to policing the situation.
I’m not certain how to move forward on this, because I think the privacy of players up to the point they have certainly broken the rules is paramount. But mostly I’m for full disclosure. I’m willing to have my toxscreen made public, and not because I don’t use steroids to beef up my use of adjectives. We do what we have to do, so why shouldn’t players? At least if what we do is legal.
An awful lot of secrets used to be kept by people who derived great power from their access to information. I sympathize with an individual’s right to freedom, but I think in the end the more information that is made public the better able the injured and oppressed will be able to set things right. And the less like the exploitative will be able to get away with their crap.
I hope so.
I personally remember the HUAC business, so whereas I generally think the pursuit of the truth is a good thing and that shining the light on facts is the best way to drive away the shadows of ignorance, I wonder whether the inquisition actually does that. I also wonder whether requiring loyalty oaths and having people paraded up and down to make public protestations of innocence serves that purpose either.
I think it’s also true that while there are siotuations where proprietary use of information has been destructive (see Iraq) in the end isn’t it true that the emotional value of certain topics overwhelms the probitive value?
What would the reaction be for the average joe if they saw the actual machinations that go on in a professional athelete’s diet and training, much less seeing what is actually involved in such drug testing programs?
Outrage almost certainly. And what would be the end result? A saner system? No it would be ruined lives, trashed reputations, an increase in NASCAR viewership (and if you don’t think those guys are on stimulants and such you aren’t paying attention) and in the end, people would be demanding that they take carbs off the pre-game training table.
The framers of our constitution actually had something going on in their noodle. If people want ionformation they can go get it, but there are protections and drags on the system to avoid the tyranny of the majority, and more to the point things to impede the mob mentality. Which is what is happening now.
The transparency that is needed is the transparency of the program to those who have to abide by it. Less naming and shaming and more information. We are outraged that Sanchez could’ve put something in his body without checking it. Unfortunately athletes in ALL sports take dozens or more supplements, none of whom have to abide by even the most rudimentary labelling requirements. If an athlete under this environments goes into a store and says..hey instead of carb loading today, I’m gonna try….this!!! OK, but that’s not the reality. He has a medicine cabinet full of supplements given to him by his trainers, his friends and so on. So he decideds to try brand X which his NFL pal uses and there’s nothing on the label that says there are banned substances in it, or it does but they use “supplement speak” Ma Huong instead of ephedra and so on. Or he does check it out and it is kosher and somewhere in the middle of the off season he doesn’t get the memo that one thing on the list of 48 ingredients is now banned…or he DOES get the memo, but doesn’t have the right dictionary to cross refenrence what the memo says its called to what the label calls it.
AND since we now have zero tolerance, he’s not going to ask anyone, because God forbid the trainer tells the Skip Bayless’ of this world, oh yeah, we try to give information. Just the other day Alex Sanchez asked about this illegal drug. Headlines next day, Skip writes, “Sanchez: illegal drugs, am I clean?” Just another example of how zero tolerance actually plays.
That and McGqire being trashed for refusing to enter the fray…naive to think he wasn’t already in it, noble to refuse to participate. Naive, but noble.
I agree with you that the one strike and you’re named solution, as if, is a problem.
But the other transparencies you cite and the public outrage that might ensue is a good thing. Is it a good thing that people with too much money pay too much money to buy tickets from owners with too much money to see players with too much money play a game that is as enjoyable to watch on a little league field for free?
Don’t believe me? Well, I guess it’s a matter of opinion, but I’ve found it easy to get my baseball fix (which is a large monkey) even when the big guys were on strike.
So, I say let’s open up the process, expose the glamour and the warts, and go from there. I think my fellow Americans are going to choose hopped up players who do things no one has ever done before, rather than cautious players who go station to station. There’s nothing wrong with that, except for the hypocrisy of those exploiting knee-jerk outrage.
If you ask me, I’d rather see those 12 year olds play the game the best they can, so long as their parents aren’t involved.
Heh! That would be the best ban, get rid of the obnoxious soccer moms and hockey dads!!! Or at least take away their guns……
I guess the thing that in this particular era bothers me is whether they would even see the hypocrisy. Jim Caple had a great piece on this on Page 2 over at ESPN. How many careers or even sports would have to be dragged in the dumpster before the public learned just the basics of what is going on?
In the McCarthy era, people were routinely ‘outed’ because they had belonged to unions, since the socialists had been involved the early parts of organized labour, this made a rhetorical point evn for members the AFL and the CIO who were more than slightly staunchly anti-communist that they sold out affiliated labour movements in latin america for the fear that they would become associated with socialists.
To this day people equate “Unions=Communism” and God forbid you suggest that there is a space to argue that even if that equation were the case, which it is emphatically not in this country, it might not be a bad thing anyway since Socialism as a political and economic theory, has nothing to do with Communisim as it was…or perhaps more appropriately wasn’t practiced.
But the same populace thinks that the NFL’s testing policy is transparent an how far would you have to go to educate the public that it is not the case? I could sit here and say that if the NFL allowed up to six times the legal alcohol limit, it would be almost assuredly a fatal level in many states, yet they allow 6 times the normal testosterone level (they are taking about going down to 4).
And that’s the MODEL?
Isn’t John Q public ultimately, at the end of the day going to look at steroid testing, which generally comes out to be a test of Testosterone and Epitestosterone levels so incredibly precises they they can’t definitively tell ANYTHING until the body is 4 times or 6 times out of wack twice within a week and say “whoah???”
And say that we can educate Jane Q too. When was the last time the American public was faced with their own hypocrisy and changed? Ever? And until the public changes, there are always going to people to supply their fix, whether it be bad cheap beer, fake boob jobs, pop singers who can’t sing but have good engineers or sports that are less pristine, but higher, faster, stronger?
And the other point is, again carb loading. Where do you draw the line. Why are steroids (lower morbidity rate than aspirin) illegal whereas carb loading, altitude training, or hell popping aspirin and coca cola (poor man’s blood thinners and greenies) aren’t? Why not Creatine (which has demonstrated negative effects on the body as opposed to presumed ones for steroids)? Isn’t there hypocrisy there?
It would be nice if baseball were run better, really it would. Baseball has such a paranoid mania about the Players association and free agency that they set up successive systems of salary escalators that aren’t particularly based on people performing well. Broken only by illegal collusion. When they should’ve just embraced free agency, allowed the market to flood, salaries would have dropped and players would have gladly signed on long term for less to avoid the mess. But that would’ve been “giving in” to the Union. The drug mess of course comes from the exact same place, and is going to have the exact same result…something unexpected. Congress is sitting there saying, excuse me Bud, YOU are the commissioner of baseball, best interests and all that horse Patooie, YOU are the man charged with fixing this. Don’t come to us with this Union crap.
And I do believe you that baseball for people who have access to it can be enjoyable on many different levels from little league on up (and for different reasons and differently in different venues). But like anything else, there is a legitimate pleasure in watching it played on the highest level.
Ultimately, what you would like to have is a reasonable set of rules that encompass current and future performance enhancers that keeps the playing field relatively level, but mainly does what you can to keep the truly dangerous stuff out of play. The problem is that no one is going to agree 100% on what that is, just as no one agree 100% with what’s in their employee’s manual, or 100% with every action of congress and so on. It’s an empty search to find that 100%, it’s a utopian utopia.
What you can do however, is not use such things as wedge issues as if it were an election in some attempt to bust the union, or in the case of the San Francisco Chronicle, strictly for the purpose of trashing a person for whom an editor has developed a personal animous. BY doing that, you present a skewed mess that people may not resolve in the way you’d like it to. i.e. lynch Barry Bonds and go on with the game, which was the Chronicale ‘s ONLY purpose in this.