Letters to the Editor
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Heffalump
As usual, you miss the point and read your own (or probably Limbaugh's) point into it. The player's union had accepted a drug testing system, but the owners threw it out. And no-one here is saying players don't bear part of the blame, we're simply pointing out that the owners and commissioners have been a part of the problem as well and they're trying to put ALL the blame on the players.
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MLB needs to follow up and investigate all allegations in depth
The historical record of baseball needs to be cleaned up. We can't have a bunch of cheaters owning the records and cluttering the Hall of Fame.
Here's what I would like to see:
An investigation, as independent and fair as possible, should be conducted for everyone named as a likely steroids user in the Mitchell report, or other reasonable source. These investigations should allow for ballplayers to defend themselves by reasonable means, such as calling witnesses and lie-detector tests.
If the investigation concludes that there is convincing evidence that a player took steroids during a given season, all individual statistics for that season should be removed from the official record books.
This would mean altering the career totals of Bonds, Clemens, etc. and possibly revoking the single-season records of Maguire as well.
Hall of Fame voters would be asked to base votes on adjusted career records, and be free to pass over athletes that were deemed cheaters.
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What it shows is..
... that the current drug testing regime does not work. Why is this?
In my opinion because the much vaunted system with confidential testing, counseling etc. is geared more towards dealing with people who have problems with addiction to recreational drugs than with people who are cheating in their sport to get an unfair advantage.
Sports always seem to be confused over this. I looked at some information for soccer, which seems to have a relatively low problem with drugs.
An Italian player was suspended for 9 months for a positive test for cocaine, and then when it was repeated he was banned for life.
In a very high profile case English defender Rio Ferndinand missed a test, supposedly because he was preoccupied with buying home furnishings, and took the test three days late and was found to be negative. He was still suspended for eight months and fined $100,000, though regarded as lucky by some not to get two years.
Mark Bosnich, a fine Australian goalkeeper was playing in London for Chelsea when he tested positive for cocaine and was fired from the club and banned from playing worldwide for 9 months.
Wikipedia says:
"Bosnich has admitted that much of the cocaine problem was due to his relationship with British model, Sophie Anderton. He does not regret his actions however, crediting them with being able to help someone in need. He said:
All I did was fall in love with someone and care about them deeply and I put them ahead of everything and so be it... As Martin Luther King said 'life is not worth living unless you find something worth dying for ... And at that time, for me, that person was more important than football.. Despite his 'selfless' actions by putting love ahead of his career, his plummet into depression was nothing but assisted by the cocaine he became addicted to, admitting There was a stage where I got up to 10 grams (of cocaine) a day when I was really down in the dumps."
A number of soccer players in various countries have tested positive for nandrolone, e.g. Edgar Davids, but do not seem to have been banned for more than a few months.
A Colombian player (shockingly) was tested positive for cocaine while playing in Argentina, and some years later was shot dead outside a night club back home in Cali.
Marijuana offences also seem to have been dealt with quite harshly.
The whole question of recreational drugs vs performance enhancing drugs is one that never seems to have been clearly worked out in terms of how sportmen and women should be dealt with.
My view is that all sports have an artificial set of rules and you have to abide by them.
A golfer who gets halfway through a round and finds he has accidentally got an extra club in his bag, even if it is someone else's fault, must disqualify himself, even if it costs hime a major, which is what happened to Ian Woosnam.
Sprinter and Olympic medallist Linford Christie was always known as a fierce opponent of performance-enhancing drugs. In an early autobiography he stated that athletes would always deny drug use and that even if you caught someone with a syringe in his arm, he would claim that it had been thrown across the room and accidentally come to rest in his vein.
Christie's career ended when he tested positive for Nandrolone. Naturally he had not willingly ingested it, but it had been an invisible ingredient in a nutritional supplement he used.
To me it seems an obvious solution that each player's individual contract of employment should stipulate no use of performance enhancing drugs, and that they should be fired for breach of contract if they test positive. That is what happened to Bosnich.
Lead us not into temptation.
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steroids
Just curious- If the accused players are cheaters and their records shouldn't count, does that mean that the Yankees from 1998-2000 are the modern Black Sox - a team of many cheaters- whose World Championships should be revoked?
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We should simply burn the HoF to the ground
Imprison all players fine the owners billions of dollars tear up every record plow the earth with salt. Ban all professional sports forever. Survivors will be eaten.
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Spectacle vs sport
In my previous letter I pointed out that sports are doing a lously job of distinguishing between recreational drug use and drug use for the purposes of cheating.
Another dichotomy that creates a great deal of bad feeling is that no one is quite clear as to whether we should now see baseball as a worldwide sport, to be enjoyed by millions of players of all ages and both sexes, with Major League Baseball at the apex of the pyramid, or whether MLB should be seen as a sui generis baseball-style entertainment, analogous to the World Wrestling Federation, a bread-and-circuses spectacle rather than a sport per se.
The difference being that a sport has rules that level the playing field for the good of all, whereas a spectacle need not.
If steroids and other chemical enhancers are allowed in baseball, then this makes it impossible for those talented individuals who wish to make a living playing baseball, but who are not willing to destroy their health with steroids from doing so.
If spectators demand more home runs, there are lots of ways that it can be arranged without the players taking steroids. How about bigger, more bouncy balls, longer bats, putting the mound further from the pitcher etc.? These suggestions may be seen as frivolous, but surely preferable to enacting federal legislation to allow baseball players to use steroids to make themselves bigger and stronger.
The game of cricket, much derided for having matches that last five days, now has a very popular format called 20-20 that is all action with many "home runs" and takes less time than the average baseball game. Any sport can remodel itself to attract the most fans without going the drugs route.