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Make it not pay to use

Johnette Howard

December 8, 2004

It's a consoling little idea to think that the baseball players' union and baseball commissioner Bud Selig will agree swiftly to a neat and tidy policy that will snare the steroid cheats, and quiet the federal prosecutors and grandstanding lawmakers who are baying at baseball's door and threatening to intervene. It's equally nice to daydream about a time in which Barry Bonds, Jason Giambi and every other alleged steroid user will have to live in a prison of his own shame, even if they're not prosecuted in court.

But the catch is to feel shame, one must genuinely feel remorse.

So far, Barry Bonds and the rest of the BALCO pharmacology projects have evinced none. Baseball's players' union has voiced next to no regrets at the scandal rocking the sport, even as the union's executive board voted yesterday in Phoenix to negotiate a new, stricter drug-testing program with ownership.

And baseball commissioner Bud Selig? He currently is blessed with more leverage than he ever could have dreamed of having against a union that has hoodwinked and outmaneuvered the owners at nearly every turn for decades. Yet Selig seems about to whiff on extracting the sort of new testing policy that should aim to set the standard for American sports, and not just provide a fig leaf for baseball and its union to hide behind.

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Doing something is not the same as doing enough.

Expedience seems to be powering the talks between Selig and the union when what baseball really needs is genuine determination by both sides to institute a dramatic new testing policy that would make the penalties for the use of performance-enhancing drugs so prohibitive, it would be lunacy to even attempt to beat the tests.

Baseball - the most tradition-steeped, statistic-driven sport of all - should be looking to be the leader in the realm of drug testing for a change.

Instead, Selig has let it be known he'd accept some re-heated version of the testing policy that's currently in use in the minor leagues.

While the minor-league testing policy that Selig is touting is tougher, it is not nearly tough enough, no matter how Robert Manfred, baseball's executive president for labor relations and human resources, tried to spin it the other day as "the best in all of professional sports" and "the real deal."

Even a cursory look at the data suggests the minor-league policy is working only marginally better than the major-league drug-testing policy that's about to be tossed out.

Under the minor-league testing program that Selig is touting, 4 percent of all minor leaguers tested positive for steroid use in 2002. That's barely less than the 5-7 percent of major leaguers who tested positive for steroids in 2003. In other words, the minor leaguers and major leaguers still used steroids at about the same rate.

What the statistics suggests is both baseball and the union need to agree on a policy that's far harsher if getting rid of steroid use is their goal. Selig and the union need to quit treating this scandal like some public relations nightmare to be managed rather than a cancer that must be completely cut out of the sport.

The players' union has to start looking at drug testing as a health issue - a way to protect steroid users from themselves.

And Selig? He doesn't even have to find heretofore absent reservoirs of vision or creativity. He just needs to mimic the approach of NBA commissioner David Stern and think big - very big - when it comes to taking a stand. Stern didn't dither when he was confronted by a crisis in his sport - that awful brawl featuring Indiana Pacers star Ron Artest at the Palace of Auburn Hills. Faced with the ugliest incident that the NBA ever has seen, Stern slapped Artest with the harshest penalty in the history of the sport.

Baseball is at a similarly ugly juncture. Selig needs to adopt a philosophical approach that recognizes that, same as Stern did.

If baseball wants to regain public trust, make the first positive test for performance- enhancing drugs a year's suspension without pay. A second positive test should be an additional two-year suspension without pay. If baseball really wants to have the best drug-testing policy in all of sports - rather than just claim to be the toughest - make every standard player's contract from this day forward carry a clause that states a third positive test result for performance-enhancing drugs voids the remainder of a player's contract.

Then we'd see how many baseball players claim to have confused flaxseed oil with a cream that suddenly makes their chest size expand by five or six inches and their biceps inflate to the size of picnic hams. But only then.