Baseball on Drugs

By Steven Beitler, DRCNet. Posted February 21, 2005.

For nearly two and a half years, a relentless drumbeat of allegations, confession and innuendo has sullied Major League Baseball's self-image and provided endless fodder for pundits inside the game and out. The current drama began in May 2002, when Ken Caminiti, a standout third baseman who retired in 2001, described for Sports Illustrated his own use as well as the rampant and routine use of steroids and amphetamines by big leaguers. The second act began unfolding in September 2003, when investigators raided Bay Area Laboratory Cooperative, or BALCO, a northern California firm that specialized in legal nutritional supplements and, according to the feds, illegal substances that BALCO had provided to elite athletes in track and field, football and baseball.

Two months later, Major League Baseball announced that between 5 percent and 7 percent of its players had tested positive for steroids during the previous spring, an outcome that meant the league would move toward its first full-scale testing in the spring of 2004. Meanwhile, the pressure only increased. In his State of the Union speech in January 2004, President Bush urged the sports establishment to remedy the drug situation. The following month, Attorney General John Ashcroft announced a 42-count indictment against four men in the BALCO case, including founder Victor Conte. Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) threatened congressional action to "clean up baseball" if the game didn't act.

Major league baseball owners and players huddled and announced on Jan. 13 the new ground rules for drug testing. At press time the agreement had not been finalized, but a spokesman for Major League Baseball said he expected to have final wording by March 1. On the day of the announcement, players union head Donald Fehr said he would be "very surprised if over time this doesn't take care of the problem virtually completely." Asked last week to assess his sport's drive against steroids and other performance-enhancing drugs, baseball commissioner Bud Selig told reporters, "As a sport, we have done everything that we could at this point ... we've done what we needed to do."

Selig's and Fehr's eagerness to put baseball's drug issues behind them is understandable, but few people expect steroids to vanish from baseball quickly. The new rules do mean more frequent testing and slightly harsher penalties. Rather than one test per year as before, players are now subject to one unannounced test per season and may have to take additional random tests in or out of season. For a first positive, a player will be suspended for 10 days without pay and named publicly. Before, a first violation put a player into treatment and not into the headlines. Now a second violation brings a 30-day vacation without pay, compared with 15 days off and up to a $10,000 fine. A third violation means a 60-day suspension versus 25 days under the old rules. A fourth offense will result in a one-year suspension, as compared to 50 days or a $50,000 fine under the old rules.

By baseball standards this is dramatic progress, but the sport still lags others by a certain standard of "toughness." The National Football League tests athletes year-round; a first violation means a four-game suspension, or 25 percent of the regular season, which would be 40 games for a baseball player. The National Collegiate Athletic Association, which runs college sports, has year-round testing in football and track and field as well as testing at its post-season championships. Student athletes who fail a test can lose a year of their collegiate eligibility. But the gold standard in testing is the Olympics, which conducts anytime, anyplace check-ins, with first-time violators facing a two-year ban.

While opinions on the impact of baseball's new program vary widely, there's no mistaking the strategy. Drug testing is the heart and soul of baseball's new rules, old rules and just about its whole approach to patterns of drug use in the sport that have shifted over decades. Like presidents and drug czars, Selig's record on the drug question has not dimmed his confidence in the sport's ability to eradicate drugs or in the tools they're using. He has been a staunch advocate of testing as the key and "zero tolerance" as his mantra.

"I've been saying for some time that my goal for this industry is zero tolerance for steroids," Selig told the Chicago Tribune in announcing the mid-January agreement. "This agreement ... is an important step toward achieving that goal." In Selig's ideal world he would bring the minor leagues' policy up to the majors: four random tests per year, a 15-game suspension for a first positive. But in the major leagues Selig and the owners tangle with a powerful and confident union whose leadership, unity and negotiating leverage have pummeled the owners for decades.