Should Congress Be Involved in Baseball's Steroid Issue?

[Ivan Seeking]

Why in world is this a congressional issue? Sure, there appears to be a problem, and the situation may need to be addressed, but isn't this an issue for law enforcement, and not the leaders of a nation.

Considering all of the problems that the US faces, I would think that ball games should come in pretty low on the list. What's next; the great bowling conspiracy?

 

[russ_watters]

Why in world is this a congressional issue?

Uh, because most congressmen don't normally get much airtime on ESPN...?

 

[selfAdjoint]

Why in world is this a congressional issue? Sure, there appears to be a problem, and the situation may need to be addressed, but isn't this an issue for law enforcement, and not the leaders of a nation.

Major League Baseball is interstate commerce if there ever was any, and so falls under the Commerce clause of the Constitution. Beyond that it has had special regulation enacted many times. If you didn't notice what the teams do with contracts and salary caps and all would be called collusion and combination in restraint of trade if it were any other business.

 

[russ_watters]

Ehh, you have a point (they do get involved in strikes, etc.), but I don't see what steroids, specifically, has to do with the economics of baseball.

edit: just saw this:

If MLB and the players union don't clean up the sport's steroid problem, then Congress will because the body believes it's a public health issue that influences youngsters to use performance-enhancing drugs.

Thin, but at least I can see some logic to it.

 

[loseyourname]

The influence on youngsters is the primary reason. There have been scare stories of steroid usage in high school students who believe it will increase their chances of making the pros, and who can blame them? If Major Leaguers are juiced, the only way to compete with them is to become juiced yourself. Professional athletes, despite what Charles Barkley would like, are role models for a great many people, and though their personal decisions are their own, steroid usage is illegal, and if MLB won't regulate it adequately themselves, then Congress must step in.

The connection to interstate commerce comes in because it is suspected that owners and MLB officials, along with union representatives, have not enacted stricter regulations because of economic concerns. The increase in home runs is directly correlated with the increased popularity of major league baseball. The duel between Sammy Sosa and Mark McGwire that resulted in McGwire breaking the single season home run record is thought to be the major event that revived ticket sales and television ratings after the strike in '95. If indeed the owners and league officials have been relunctant to enact strict steroid policies because it would hurt ticket sales, then Congress is within its jurisdiction in stepping in, especially when the health of young people is partially at stake.

 

[Ivan Seeking]

How about drug sting operations? Why is this different than any other drug issue? Bust em and lock em up. That will get the attention of youngsters everywhere.

Still, the point about interstate commerce is a good one. Never thought of that.

 

[misskitty]

Why in world is this a congressional issue? Sure, there appears to be a problem, and the situation may need to be addressed, but isn't this an issue for law enforcement, and not the leaders of a nation.

Considering all of the problems that the US faces, I would think that ball games should come in pretty low on the list. What's next; the great bowling conspiracy?

Doesn't congress have anything better to do than debate this issue? Shouldn't the administrators of the major league be the ones who are correcting this issue? Why waste congress' time? Don't they have a bill to pass or something.

 

[selfAdjoint]

Congress will undoubtedly now make steroids a scheduled substance and add it to the wonderfully successful war on drugs; justification as usual, to "protect the kids". Kids I know, going back to the stone age when I was a kid myself, always knew how to get any drugs they wanted. Sometimes they wanted and sometimes they didn't, but there was never any problem about getting.

 

[loseyourname]

Congress will undoubtedly now make steroids a scheduled substance and add it to the wonderfully successful war on drugs; justification as usual, to "protect the kids". Kids I know, going back to the stone age when I was a kid myself, always knew how to get any drugs they wanted. Sometimes they wanted and sometimes they didn't, but there was never any problem about getting.

It really should be more difficult to obtain steroids. They don't just grow on trees the way coca and marijuana do, and they can't be manufactured in home labs the way methamphetamine and ecstasy can be. Steroid precursors are another matter, as they can often be found even in herbal form, but the steroids themselves, especially the new designer steroids that the major leaguers were actually using, are only manufactured by a few select labs. Going after the suppliers in this case may very well work, unlike what we have seen with the more common illegal drugs, especially given that the suppliers are professional chemists working for nutritional supplement companies, not rogue criminals sitting at the heads of virtual armies.

 

[Ivan Seeking]

Congress will undoubtedly now make steroids a scheduled substance and add it to the wonderfully successful war on drugs;

From what I heard during the Olympics, people are making new drugs faster than they can ban the old ones.

 

[Moonbear]

From what I heard during the Olympics, people are making new drugs faster than they can ban the old ones.

It's also hard to enforce a ban on any drug if you can't detect it, which makes Congressional involvement even more pointless since they will probably just wind up passing legislation with no provision for enforcement. The newer drugs are being designed to avoid detection in drug testing, and as soon as a new test comes out, it seems there's another new drug waiting on the sidelines to again evade detection.

As an aside, I wish they'd go a more legitimate route with manufacturing these drugs so their therapeutic values could be assessed. One of these artificial steroids could turn out to be useful in treating things like hormone dependent cancers or for alleviating menopausal symptoms, and they'll probably be banned before they ever get a chance to be screened for more useful purposes than pumping up baseball players.

 

[misskitty]

Congress will undoubtedly now make steroids a scheduled substance and add it to the wonderfully successful war on drugs; justification as usual, to "protect the kids". Kids I know, going back to the stone age when I was a kid myself, always knew how to get any drugs they wanted. Sometimes they wanted and sometimes they didn't, but there was never any problem about getting.

I can only imagine what a congressman would think after he/she spent a day with me and saw what goes on at my school, with stress, drugs, sex and all. I couldn't even picture what they would be like if they saw what an inner city school is like. "Protect the kids"...we're not as naive as they make us out to be.

If they want to protect us, why not address the question of why American high school seniors have one of the highest suicide rates in the world. I'll give you a hint, it has to do with the education system and colleges. My physics teacher told us that after he had read it. I can't remember where he said it was from.

Congress makes gestures to "protect" us adolscents. They're not doing the best job in the world. I comend them for trying, but they need to put in a little more effort instead of pushing their own agendas.

 

[misskitty]

From what I heard during the Olympics, people are making new drugs faster than they can ban the old ones.

I heard that too. It always amazes me how they manage to get that creative with different substances.

There is a new drug out there. I heard about it on Good Morning America. Apparently teens are smoking marajuana laced with coc and dipped in fermeldahyde and other embalming fluids. Now that's gross.

 

[misskitty]

Moonbear, you've got a good point. There has got to be someway to test for drugs that can't be faked.

 

[Ivan Seeking]

As another aside, I have been waiting for the day that "legitimate" sports records would separate from the actual records. It seems to me that we may be seeing the first episodes of such a division. There is talk of throwing out some records if steroid use is believed to have contributed. IIRC, the Olympics commission has already done so. I expect that we will see another new arena of sports continue to grow - the whatever-is-possible-by-any-means crowd. To me it seems inevitable that for all practical purposes, superhumans will emerge via drugs, gene therapy, or whatever other technologies are available to increase the limits of human performance. Also, it seems likely to me that for many years to come, this will cost many young people their lives.

 

[misskitty]

It does seem inevitable. As far as the throwing out any steriod involved records, it sounds like a good idea.

 

[Ivan Seeking]

But people will still know what the real records are...

 

[misskitty]

True. They will. It might be an incentive for people to not use drugs for free of having their records tossed out with the garbage. Doubtful, but wishful thinking.

 

[Ivan Seeking]

Oh, I don't mean to say that nothing should be done. But in the end these things seem pretty tough to control. I can't help but wonder how large the gap may grow between real sports records, and the legally recognized records.

 

[misskitty]

Oh no. I totally agree with you. Seriously. It would be very hard to control. I can't even think of a place where they might start to go through the records. I mean they might want to start when steriods started to make headlines? I have no idea.

 

[loseyourname]

It's also hard to enforce a ban on any drug if you can't detect it, which makes Congressional involvement even more pointless since they will probably just wind up passing legislation with no provision for enforcement. The newer drugs are being designed to avoid detection in drug testing, and as soon as a new test comes out, it seems there's another new drug waiting on the sidelines to again evade detection.

They get around this problem in the Olympics by taking two urine samples. They test one right away and keep the other for several years, until they have better tests to detect substances that were previously undetectable. That's the reason you see so many people having their medals stripped from them years after the fact. I'd love to see MLB implement a policy like that, but there's no way the union would accept it, and MLB has a very strong union, which is why they were the last major sport to implement testing of any kind, have an absolutely toothless policy, and no salary cap despite the huge disparity in competition between the large and small market teams.

 

[Moonbear]

Can you imagine the mess it would create to strip MLB titles after-the-fact? What sort of chaos would ensue in the sport if teams were suddenly stripped of a World Series title because a player tested positive a year or two later? How would that affect who plays whom and player contracts? It's a little easier with the Olympics. It's played once every 4 years, the competitors are different every time, they are amateurs, so there's no prize money or contracts to pay them for competing, etc. Then again, I wouldn't complain if they just ended MLB if they find illegal steroid abuse is too widespread to control.

 

[Moonbear]

Oh, I don't mean to say that nothing should be done. But in the end these things seem pretty tough to control. I can't help but wonder how large the gap may grow between real sports records, and the legally recognized records.

How would you know which past records were obtained with the aid of performance enhancing drugs when there were no tests done at the time? What's more likely to happen is that nobody will be able to break the old records if they play clean. The only way I could see it being possible would be to just wipe the slate clean and start tracking new records from the date the enforcement takes effect. Can you imagine the uproar from fans of seeing old records just tossed to the wind?

 

[BobG]

How would you know which past records were obtained with the aid of performance enhancing drugs when there were no tests done at the time? What's more likely to happen is that nobody will be able to break the old records if they play clean. The only way I could see it being possible would be to just wipe the slate clean and start tracking new records from the date the enforcement takes effect. Can you imagine the uproar from fans of seeing old records just tossed to the wind?

Personally, I've found baseball becoming more irrelevant ever since they canceled the Series in '94. I followed that Indians team for a few more years, but pretty much lost interest in baseball as that bunch of players slowly broke up.

I almost think baseball owners were afraid to address the issue of performance enhancing drugs because they needed the extra attention of players challenging famous records to keep bringing in the money they can't seem to help paying the players. Almost a second-hand endorsement by silence of whatever it took for players to raise their performances to legendary levels - juiced parks, juiced balls, juiced players - whatever it takes.

Baseball has always had a problem with statistics - it's an integral part of the sport in spite of the fact that the stats have always been suspect. Just about any legendary record set before 1950 has been unbreakable because it's seriously inflated by the lack of talent that existed in baseball during it's early years. For example, when Ruth hit 60 home runs, only white Americans were eligible to play in the majors. If you took the percentage of the eligible US population that played in the major leagues and applied that same percentage to today, then you need to expand the major leagues to encompass all of the AAA clubs (imagine how many home runs McGwire or Bonds would hit if half their games were against AAA clubs). Expanding to the AAA clubs just accounts for the larger US population, plus expanding the talent pool to include Hispanic and black Americans. It doesn't account for the number of foreign players playing in the major leagues (I wouldn't know how to account for that).

In spite of that, Ruth's 60 home runs was always considered superior to Maris's 61, blaming Maris's 61 on a longer season and diluted talent (such an ironic claim) and Ruth's 714 career home runs was always considered superior to Aaron's 755, blaming Aaron's larger number of plate appearances (a bizarre twist - Aaron's better work ethic diminishes his career accomplishments while the plate appearances Ruth missed because of hangovers makes his accomplishments greater - surely it wasn't just his color, was it?).

A large number of fans will have no problem dealing with the records of McGwire and Bonds - they'll just keep track of three sets of records now instead of two (or, maybe Maris and Aaron will finally get their due). At least, baseball probably hopes so. Without the stats, baseball just doesn't compete with the action of football or basketball among younger people.

They change the stats all the time, anyway. It was sometime around 1990 that they erased most of baseball's no-hitters. While I could see erasing the rain-shortened 5 inning no-hitters, they also erased one of baseball's best trivia questions: Who was the only pitcher to be credited with a no-hitter in a relief appearance. The answer: Ernie Shore of the 1919 Red Sox. The starting pitcher showed up with a hangover, threw four straight balls, then got tossed out of the game for arguing with the ump. Shore picked the runner off first and retired the next 26 batters. The starting pitcher? Babe Ruth, of course (why did the Red Sox sell him to the Yankees, again?)

 

[russ_watters]

Bob, I think the Babe's allure is fading. If nothing else, the record-chasing/breaking in the past few years has raised the status of Aaron and Maris. All of my friends consider them the real deal and McGuire, Bonds, and Sosa to be drug-induced fads. The Babe? A fat drunk who could have been great if he wasn't such a loser.

 

[SOS2008]

I remember questioning government involvement in sports over a player's display in remembrance of his friend Pat Tillman. Aside from wondering why our government is spending time in such areas, when there are so many political issues in the toilet these days, it could be indicative of a much deeper issue of Big Brother. Whether the Patriot Act, or recent interventions regarding Terri Shiavo, we have been heading toward fascism since 9-11, so we'll probably see more and more government involvement in private sector matters...

 

[BobG]

I remembering questioning government involvement in sports over a player's display in remembrance of his friend Pat Tillman. Aside from wondering why our government is spending time in such areas, when there are so many political issues in the toilet these days, it could be indicative of a much deeper issue of Big Brother. Whether the Patriot Act, or recent interventions regarding Terri Shiavo, we have been heading toward fascism since 9-11, so we'll probably see more and more government involvement in private sector matters...

Are you talking about Jake Plummer deciding to continue the NFL's tribute to Pat Tillman beyond the designated weekend?

I don't think the 'government' got involved in that so much as a few politicians (John McCain, for one) made their own personal opinion of the situation public. They may have had some influence in the NFL and Plummer reaching an agreement, but their influence was unofficial. It was probably minor, in any event. When Plummer decided a $25,000 a week fine for wearing Tillman's number was worth it, the NFL was kind of stuck behind a rock - they had a PR disaster that they needed to end as soon as possible.

Edit: Plummer's kind of a cool guy to have as quarterback of your favorite team. You like rooting for him. He doesn't make very good 'football' decisions, so you sometimes have to scream at the TV that he sucks (he throws left-handed particularly bad - even for a right-handed guy), but, hey, he makes some great plays, too. Riding the roller coaster is always fun, right?

 

[SOS2008]

Are you talking about Jake Plummer deciding to continue the NFL's tribute to Pat Tillman beyond the designated weekend?

I don't think the 'government' got involved in that so much as a few politicians (John McCain, for one) made their own personal opinion of the situation public. They may have had some influence in the NFL and Plummer reaching an agreement, but their influence was unofficial. It was probably minor, in any event. When Plummer decided a $25,000 a week fine for wearing Tillman's number was worth it, the NFL was kind of stuck behind a rock - they had a PR disaster that they needed to end as soon as possible.

Yes--it was a big deal here in Arizona with John McCain getting involved and all. I agree, it wasn't that big of a deal on the spectrum of things, but I remember thinking the same thing when this happened per the original post of this thread--regarding government involvement. But then, all we've had has been the Cardinals--we've needed other excitement (though they've been doing better).

 

[misskitty]

This is going to sound stupid, being the baseball fan that I am, but why did they cancel the world series in 1994? I was only six so I don't know anything about it...I wasn't watching baseball then. Could someone enlighten me please?

 

[kyleb]

The players went on strike.

As for the issue of steroid use, Louis Black made a good point on the Dally Show tonight. In his younger years many of the top players were alcoholics, and we should work to move the players off the performance enhancing drugs and back to the performance debilitating drugs like the good old days, for the sake of the children.