OK, so what really happened at the baseball labor negotiations last week? Why did the Players Association suddenly seem to cave on the issue of steroids and random drug testing? And does this indicate a faltering on the side of the union, or perhaps a thaw in the negotiations?
The answer is none of the above. The answer is that the union's executive director, Don Fehr, finally did a sensational jiujitsu move on the owners and reversed the momentum of the talks. The simple fact is that the owners don't really care that much about the issue of steroids. They have never made it the focal point of any discussion, and only brought it into the current debate when they thought it could be used to distract the players and score public relations points with the public. The owners' attitude toward "recreational" drugs, which can hurt a player's performance and therefore devalue him as property, and steroids, which, arguably, can increase the players' value as gate attractions, has always been hypocritical. They have always paid lip service to the elimination of steroids without ever making a serious proposal. The players, for their part, have always mistrusted the owners' intentions on this issue, and rightfully so, ever since then commissioner Peter Ueberroth attempted to violate a carefully worked out agreement and make himself the "Drug Czar" of baseball in 1982.
So what happened the other day is that Fehr finally cut his losses on this issue, and decided that the union had little to lose in agreeing to random testing compared to the beating it was taking in the press. Never mind that most of those commenting on the situation had little knowledge of the history of drug testing in sports. Many held up the example of Olympic athletes as a model; few noticed that the IOC has a blatant double standard in this regard, never having asked for testing on pro athletes such as NHL hockey players and NBA basketball players. One thing that Fehr must have realized was that the union in the long run probably had little to fear from the possibility of harassment when it came to random testing, since no Major League owner is anxious to make his own superstar look bad in public. In other words, I very much doubt if any influential owner is going to lose his big stars by virtue of a drug suspension before the playoffs start.
More to the point, what Fehr did was to simply defuse drugs as an issue in the negotiations. Now we're back to what the issue has been all along: the luxury tax on spending proposed by the owners, designed to hold down the players' salaries. Stay tuned.