Business as Usual

A week after the release of the Mitchell Report, baseball is shrugging it off, according to an editorial in today's San Diego Union-Tribune.

The newspaper makes a good point. The players union has to take the lead in this, or steroids will continue to stain the sport and every accomplishment by individuals and teams.

It seems odd, to me, that there should be mechanisms in place for punishing people who engage in recreational drug use, but nothing in place to punish those who use drugs to profit.

Is the profit motive considered so pure and praiseworthy that the ends justify the means? And the recreation motive is considered selfish?

What are your thoughts?

Ambiguity and Baseball

Mitch Albom makes a valid point in the Detroit Free Press.

He gives two lists of statements, one supporting the position "Why Steroids Don't Matter" and the other supporting the position "Why Steroids Matter." Readers are asked to circle the statements they agree with, then compare the number of circled statements from each list.

"Bigger number is where you stand," Albom writes, using phrasing that, perhaps unintentionally, reflects the nature of the problem.

"And if that sounds like confusing, non-declarative, mixed signals," Albom concludes, "well, now you know how baseball came to this sorry point in the first place."

I couldn't agree more. It's the ambiguity that has existed in baseball on this issue for many years that has led the sport -- and others, as well -- to the predicament it faces.

Thomas Boswell says, in the Washington Post, that "Perhaps what is most chilling in the Mitchell report is the casual business-as-usual comments of general managers and scouts as they discuss what they assume is the steroid use of players."

When the report was released Thursday, commissioner Bud Selig "incredibly said ... he hadn't read [it]," Boswell points out, but "[t]he metastasizing problem was clear before the strike of '94, not several years after it, as the commissioner likes to rewrite history. The media couldn't prove it. Many fans were indifferent to it. But that doesn't excuse baseball for conveniently ignoring it."

Now, as Boswell concludes, "with its analysis of the past and its recommendations for the future, the Mitchell report gives baseball a choice: stop digging deeper into denial, throw away that damn shovel and grab this rope like it's your last hope."

In the coming years, the players who have been using steroids will face their own consequences when the performance-enhancing drugs have done their lethal work. The players have reaped the temporary benefits, but, as no less an authority than the Bible says, "He that troubleth his own house shall inherit the wind."

Baseball must deal with that inheritance now. And it must try to understand the reasons why it stood idly by and allowed this to happen. And then take credible steps to clean up the mess.

Good luck with that.

The Fallout From the Mitchell Report

J.C. Bradbury writes in the New York Times that baseball players should police themselves.

It is not possible, he says, to achieve the total elimination of performance-enhancing drugs. Therefore, the objective must be "the second-best goal of reducing performance-enhancing drug use."

Under a system of significant fines and bonuses, baseball can clean up its act, he says.

In the Los Angeles Times, Helene Elliott says baseball players need to take responsibility for what happens in their sport.

Childs Walker, in the Baltimore Sun, reassures everyone that baseball will bounce back, as it always seems to do after a scandal.

And Jason Whitlock, in the Kansas City Star, is even more reassuring. It's the fault of the system, he says. This is a drug culture in which everyone does it. Everyone self-medicates to keep doing their jobs.

I think Whitlock could be on to something here, but I can't help feeling he takes it to the extreme. I do believe, however, that he's right when he says there's no easy solution to the problem. But, just because it isn't easy or self-evident, does that mean we shouldn't even try to find an answer?

I'm glad we're having this discussion. And I hope there will be much more said about this. We've turned the other way for too long, when everyone knew there was a problem.

So even if Whitlock is right and the steroid scandal is the result of peer pressure, it's time for some tough love.

Where Baseball Needs to Go Now

Jerome Solomon of the Houston Chronicle thinks the Mitchell Report is a "sad day" for baseball.

I disagree.

Sure, it's sad to realize that some of the biggest names in the game -- Roger Clemens, newly crowned home run king Barry Bonds and others -- have been cheating to succeed.

But this is one of those pivotal moments, a fork in the road. Major league baseball must make a real commitment to ridding itself of the cheaters, as surely as it did in the 1920s following the Black Sox Scandal.

If handled correctly, the rehabilitation ultimately will be joyful for the sport and its fans.

I'm not saying it won't be painful for a time. As it is for an individual who must deal with the withdrawal from an addiction to nicotine or alcohol or heroin, baseball must cope with its withdrawal pangs from performance-enhancing drugs.

But, as the old saying goes, no pain, no gain. And there is so much to be gained.

The release of the Mitchell Report is, as Jay Mariotti writes in the Chicago Sun-Times, "the first day of the rest of our baseball lives."

What kind of life that will be depends on how baseball's owners and players -- and fans -- react to this issue.

It's out there, no longer hidden in the shadows. Out there for all to see. Will we sweep it under the rug? Or will we learn from it?