Protecting the Rights of the Players
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.
The end of all the arguments over performance-enhancing drugs in baseball is that, save for a lunatic fringe, there is general agreement on the need for a rigorous and comprehensive testing program that ensures, so far as is possible, a level field for all ballplayers. Even assuming good faith on the part of owners and players – a faith they in which they have given us no reason to believe – I think such a program is impossible.
Still, whatever comes out of the current negotiations between labor and management will be a good deal better than the farcical joke now in place. For anyone who cares about baseball – or about right and wrong – that can only be a good thing.
Imagining what a proper drugs-testing program would look like isn’t difficult, but the exercise quickly makes one much more sympathetic to the concerns of the players’ union for privacy and accountability.
Simply testing for steroids is ridiculous. Instead, Major League Baseball should conform to Olympic standards and test for a wide variety of substances. Here we run into our first problem – two of the most widely used performance enhancers, testosterone and human growth hormone, are entirely natural. Various protocols define acceptable levels of these chemicals differently-the NFL, for instance, considers a testosterone level six times higher than normal to be perfectly acceptable-and so stringent testing would involve necessarily somewhat arbitrary choices as to whether or not elevated levels of testosterone or hGH were indicative of abuse.
As a practical matter, the union has to be concerned for the hypothetical player whose body naturally produces testosterone at levels above the acceptable threshold. While such a person may not exist, he is not impossible either, and his rights must be protected.
Baseball would do poorly to accept the evidentiary standards of the Olympics, where athletes can be blacklisted without evidence that would hold up in court. This example shows the kind of trust the players will need to have in the competence and discrimination of the body administering the drugs-testing program. Given the acrimonious history of labor-management relations in baseball, it’s not hard to see why any body that was acceptable to team owners would by that very fact be suspicious to players.
Assuming these problems are out of the way, you have the problems of collection. For testing to be more than a public-relations exercise, it has to be year-round, unannounced, and compulsory for all players. (One of the dirty, open secrets of the steroids tests that have been administered for the last two years is the infrequency with which superstar players have been subjected to the random tests.)
Aside from being a logistical nightmare, this is something to which even the cleanest ballplayer has legitimate objections. Would you want someone showing up with a plastic cup while you were on vacation?
Outside of that problem, you still have privacy issues to be concerned about. No one wants false positives leaked to the press; few want true positives leaked, either. The reason illegal performance enhancers are wrong and corrupt is that they force a choice between the unknown effects of an illegal and possibly dangerous drug and success in one’s chosen field. It doesn’t follow that anyone who uses them needs to be exposed and humiliated before the public.
Considering that player urine samples, identifying keys, and a list of positive tests were seized with no evident justification by federal agents last year, why shouldn’t players believe that agreeing to a robust drugs testing program amounts to signing away their privacy?
And even if you take care of the problems of what is tested for, how it is tested, and of privacy, you still have the issue of punishment. Calls for throwing first-time offenders out of the game forever are ridiculous. Clearly, though, stiff penalties are needed as a deterrent, on the lines of a lengthy suspension for first offense and permanent banishment for a third offense. What union can ethically agree to a system that allows for its members to be expelled from their profession without receiving significant concessions?
In thinking these problems through, we end up with the broad outline of a real system – one that conforms to international standards of drug prohibition, includes a neutral administrative body, involves year-round unannounced testing, rigorous privacy safeguards, and harsh penalties. There is almost no chance the players’ union will agree to anything nearly so far-reaching.
Perhaps they would, though, if the owners agreed to put something substantial on the table, something that would compensate for the rights sacrificed by players in a testing program. (And no matter how much players want a clean game, the rights to privacy and a presumption of innocence are rights, not to be given away lightly.) Players, after all, do not own the game; management does. Owners are the ones with the longest-term interest in making sure drugs do not corrupt the game to the point where their very franchises lose their value, and thus must make sacrifices if they want to rid the game of drugs.
I think that in exchange for the players agreeing to a program as rigorous as the one sketched above, the owners should permanently drop the idea of a salary cap in any form. That would be an enormous concession on their part, and something that the union could accept as the fair price of allowing agents of MLB to show up at Derek Jeter’s house with a plastic cup and a grin. It would also, perhaps, provide a framework for more cooperation in collective bargaining, an example of how mutual concessions can advance mutual interests.
Even such a program wouldn’t, of course, stop drug use. There’s a reason why they say positive testers failed their IQ test, not their drug test. But it would show that on both sides, owners and players were willing to set aside their legitimate interests in the name of comity and the broader health of the game.
If they were willing to do that, the people could forgive any number of transgressions by individuals against the system, for they would see that the system was not, itself, corrupt. That, not Barry Bonds’s hat size, is the real threat to the integrity of the game, and the longer it is left untended, the worse the consequences will be.