Steroids

Owners should have seen that their investments – their players – were hurting themselves both literally (performance enhancing drugs have been shown to cause long term physical and emotional damage) and figuratively (nobody likes a cheater), and forced the player’s union to accept some sort of drug testing, monitoring, and educational program.

More so than the owners, the players themselves bungled the steroid issue. The players who used were cheaters. And the players who didn’t were enablers. The players could have gone to their union representatives and argued that all suffer when a few use drugs. When a few bad apples appear, the whole tree looks bad. Those honorable players who avoided performance enhancers should have united and demanded that the playing field be leveled by comprehensive drug testing.

So here we are, ten years or so into this mess, and still no real resolution. The damning Mitchell Report named names, and the whole world now doubts just about every run that was scored since the Bash Brothers (noted users Mark McGwire and Jose Canseco of the Oakland Athletics) came onto the national scene in the late 1980’s. The answer to the problem is simple: learn from the past to make the future better.

We cannot fix our past mistakes, but we can certainly use them to better ourselves. Major League Baseball must do the same. They must hire an independent outside organization to develop and enforce the strictest drug policy in sports. Year-around random testing is only the beginning. New technology, better research, improved education, transparent testing, harsh consequences, and mandatory meetings with everyone involved will make the program more reliable and valid. Just like they recovered from the Black Sox scandal or the strike of 1994, baseball will recover from the steroid issue. The question remains though – how quickly and how well.