Baseball’s Fight Off the Field
BY DANNY STEINBERG
Why do we arm wrestle or race? Whether for food, land, or a mate, for millions of years the outcomes of competitions determined who survived and who did not. As modern convenience has made it so that we don’t have to kill one another over a particularly choice bison, other means of satisfying our need to compete have come into existence.
A casual glimpse of American society reveals the most obvious of competitive avenues: sports. From youth recreational teams to professional sports leagues, millions of people in the United States lace up their cleats, put on their mitts, and buckle their helmets before sweating and bleeding for glory.
The world of sports is a microcosm for life in that the athlete with the best advantage is the most likely to succeed. The quarterback that can throw the ball that much farther or the goalie that can make the extraordinary save bring more to their respective sport than their less able counterparts, and as such it’s no wonder that professional athletes do almost anything they can in order to make sure that they are the ones with the superior abilities. Most stick to strict training regimens and diets, but there are some who take a different route and opt to use performance-enhancing drugs instead.
Of all major American sports, none has faced more scrutiny in recent history for its players’ steroid use than baseball. During the 1990s, players who looked like they could successfully wrestle a bull were hitting balls farther than ever before. At the beginning of the last decade, the public started to realize that the fireworks shows that they had been treated to were the result of artificial enhancement.
In the wake of this epiphany, cases against former ballplayers and congressional hearings about steroids have littered the sports news landscape. While Major League Baseball has made an effort to curb steroid use among its players by implementing urine testing in 2002, and, just this past winter, blood testing for Human Growth Hormone, the road to cleaning up the game has proceeded more slowly than many would like. Commissioner Bud Selig would like nothing more than to declare victory, but recent events have shown such a proclamation to be distant.
This January, a story broke in the Miami New Times detailing records from a clinic in Miami that was a supplier of steroids for athletes, many of them baseball players. After carefully looking over the facts, MLB has suspended Ryan Braun, star left fielder for the Milwaukee Brewers, for the remainder of the 2013 season, and is expected to render judgment on about 20 more players including Alex Rodriguez, he of the biggest contract in MLB’s history. These suspensions are not surprising; dozens of players have already received suspensions over the last ten years. What is different this time around is how the various actors involved in the suspensions are interacting.
As the commissioner of baseball, Bud Selig was elected by and reports to the owners of each team. He represents their interests. At the other end of the spectrum is the MLB Players’ Association, the union to which all players belong. When players are suspended and wish to appeal the suspension, they do so with the support of the MLBPA.
In the past, the MLBPA has not sat idly by when the commissioner’s office has handed down a steroid-related suspension, though their efforts do not usually result in the overturning of the suspension. The only notable victory for them came before the 2012 season, when Braun was able to get a 50-game suspension overturned on an independent arbitrator’s ruling that Braun’s urine sample had been improperly handled.
What is intriguing this time is that the MLBPA and Selig are actually cooperating with each other. Union President Michael Weiner has gone on record saying that the MLBPA will not fight any suspension for which Selig can provide proper evidence and that it will instead encourage those players to make a deal like Braun has. This stance is a far cry from just a decade ago, when the two groups would have used every shred of power in their arsenals to fight each other.
That’s not to say that the MLBPA will roll over; they will likely fight some of the suspensions that they believe can be overturned. And if Selig tries to give some first-time offenders punishments befitting those with bigger rap sheets as is speculated he may try with Rodriguez, the fight may spill from the diamond to the courtroom.
Players can have all the talent in the world, but the game won’t be fair unless everyone is held to the same standards. Although individual differences are an inherent part of competition, Baseball and the union both recognize the need to keep the playing field level.