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Eighty-six Major League Baseball players, past and present, including putative home run king Barry Bonds and vehement denier/lousy alibier Roger Clemens, were named in former Sen. George Mitchell's recently released report as users of performance-enhancing substitutes ranging from steroids to growth hormone, both human and bovine. As the late, great Scooter, Phil Rizzuto (38 decidedly non-turbo-boosted HRs in 5,816 career at-bats), would have said: "Holy cow!"
In the face of such meaty evidence, even a party-line hack like MLB commissioner Bud Selig can no longer keep his head in the sand and his hand on the till. So far, he has sagely chosen to go with the age-old Three-Point White-Collar Harrumph Plan:
- Wring hands.
- Point finger sternly.
- But then slap wrists ever so gently (a 15-day suspension for super-sized Kansas City outfielder Jose Guillen to go with his brand-new $36M contract?).
Bud, Bud, Bud. Now is not the time to sweep this unholy mess under the carpet. First of all, someone might step on a syringe. And secondly, since the customer is always right, why not just fess up and give the people what they want? The long ball -- power source be damned.
A humble proposal: The American League should go libertarian.
After all, this is America, where the unofficial state religion is the relentless pursuit of self-improvement (from preschool SAT prep courses to octogenarian Botox), so let's toss away the pee cup and yell batter up!
Pandora's bat-rack is open
Over three decades ago, the AL mortally offended purists by allowing the Designated Hitter to become part of the game. So why not just go all the way and become a circuit where absolutely no workplace testing is done (at least until the player has committed a felony), everything short of bionics is allowed and salary caps are nonexistent?
You may scoff, contending that such stigmatized spectacle would find no space in the marketplace, but consider the recent example of Ultimate Fighting and its offshoots. Once viewed as a fringe quasilegal activity, the UFC has roared past boxing as the violent-combat sport of choice in the past decade.
Recently on the TV show Sports Unfiltered with Dennis Miller (for which I am a producer), the national pastime's excommunicated all-time hits leader, Pete Rose, drew big laughs from the audience when he said that the players named in the recently released Mitchell Report are "making [me] look like an altar boy."
Rose, who was banned from baseball in 1987 for the cardinal sin of gambling on games while managing the Cincinnati Reds, concluded his interview by stating that if he played in the Roids Era, he "would've had 5,000 hits." Although that was also intended for laughs (which it got -- Pete still hits for a high average), it's not a stretch to imagine that a man who competed so hard that he ran out bases on balls and bulldozed a catcher in an All-Star Game would have "taken one for the team" and joined the ranks of the Altered Boys. Why not, when the results speak for themselves?
See more stories tagged with: steroids, bud selig, mlb
Michael X. Ferraro is a TV writer/producer and the co-author of Numbelievable: The Dramatic Stories Behind the Most Memorable Numbers in Sports History (Triumph Books).
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