Baseball Owners Again Seek To Do Nothing
Here we go again.
The report is out, confirming what anyone who paid attention to the issue suspected all along. Some of the biggest stars in major league baseball for the past decade, cheated by taking performance-enhancing drugs.
What is the major league (i.e., club owners) response? There probably isn't much they can do about it because most of the steroid behavior does not rise to a legal violation. Any illegalities were con- cerned with side issues related to the behavior.
The owners, along everyone inside baseball who knew about these violations early on, are once again trying to deflect the issue and continue doing nothing. Their response should not stop with being satis- fied the players have been exposed and most already are retired or gone or about to be gone from their clubs.
For a start, ban all of them from the league. More importantly, cleanse the rec- ord books. Every player who has been exposed, and anyone else ex- posed later, should be stricken from the record books and any team record achieved while one of them was playing also should be stricken.
Just as purist baseball fans still believe Babe Ruth is the home run champion, the cheaters should not be allowed in the record books without an sterisk. Roger Maris deserved to stay on The Mitchell Report the books as long as there was an as- terisk by his home-run champion appellation because he passed Ruth after the 154th game, which was the season's length in Ruth's day and just before Maris played.
Today's guys cheated. They may not have broken any law that was in place at the time, but they cheated by trying to get an artificial edge on their fellow players, and they cheated the current fans and those to come who like to follow the records, those who pay big bucks for mementoes of their "heroes," and those still willing to shell out even bigger bucks so they can watch a bunch of multi-millionaire mostly 20- somethings with their hot-dog prancing and in-your-face attitude.
It is bad enough everyone is getting bulked up so much to please the bubba crowd, the game is turning into another sport for freaks, a la pro football and basketball. Baseball always has been an everyman's sport, meaning that even small guys can compete at the highest levels because it is a game of skill, smarts, flexibility and intriguing plot.
Using artificial means instead of pure work, to get an edge over your opponents is not what sports is supposed to be about. It is the equivalent of corking bats, an action all players would call cheating.
Letting the cheaters get by with a slap on the wrist will result only in the next batch of players trying to get an unfair edge by using the next magic potion that comes along.
Major league owners, the sports media and indivi- dual fans need to set the stage for future generations to Lenny Dykstra say, "Barry who?" "Roger Who?"
