Steroid Scandal Can’t Faze MLB’s Rising Revenues
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It is decision time in Bud Selig’s office: The commissioner of Major League Baseball, along with his president and chief operating officer, Bob DuPuy, and the rest of the administrative staff, will have to figure out whether the National Football League’s move of ignoring a doping trial is a prudent way to deal with the current indictment against Barry Bonds of perjury and obstruction of justice in the BALCO case, or if MLB should get involved in the process. The NFL went through its own major steroids scandal involving members of the 2003 Carolina Panthers (the team went to the 2004 Super Bowl), which ended with Dr. James Shortt pleading guilty to conspiring to illegally prescribe steroids to several Panthers players. Dr. Shortt ended up with a one year and one day prison term following his March 2006 plea. Despite a “60 Minutes” story, a trial, and a plea, the story disappeared. Dr. Shortt and the Panthers players are a mere footnote to sports history.
The NFL did not hire a former United States Senate Majority Leader to do an investigation of steroids and other banned substances in its industry, as baseball did when it hired George Mitchell to head its own investigation. Instead, it continued on its merry way, signing huge TV contracts, putting together its own cable TV network, and scheduling a regular season game in such unfamiliar American football sites as London. NFL consumers went right along with this ignorance-is-bliss theory. There was no backlash against the NFL because of the Dr. Shortt trail in South Carolina — unlike the constant press and fan backlash against Bonds, MLB, and Selig.
Of course, the backlash has not been followed by real action. Talk is cheap, after all, particularly on sports talk radio. MLB made more than $6 billion in 2007 and sold 79.5 million tickets to games. That is the problem. When it comes to putting their money where their mouths are, people simply don’t care about Barry Bonds, BALCO, drug testing, Jason Giambi, or steroid investigations by Mitchell and former New York District Attorney P. David Soares. People are spending money to buy big-ticket items such as luxury boxes, club seating, and non-premium seating in stadiums, purchasing merchandise, and flocking to baseball’s mlb.com site, an Internet portal that generated $450 million in revenues in 2007.
Despite all the talk about the Bonds investigation, there is no stopping baseball’s revenue juggernaut. Companies are lining up to become marketing partners with either MLB or local franchises. The governor of Florida, Charlie Crist, is backing the construction of a proposed stadium for the Marlins franchise at the Orange Bowl site in Miami; and the Tampa Bay Rays’ ownership want a waterfront stadium in St. Petersburg where Al Lang Field, the former spring home of the New York Mets, currently sits. Politicians in Minnesota, New York, and Washington are eagerly writing checks for the public financing of new stadiums, or to provide infrastructure, tax breaks, and incentives for new facilities. Some people in Portland, Ore., would like to go after a baseball team, whether it is a relocation or an expansion franchise. Arizona officials just broke ground on a publicly funded spring training facility that will house the Los Angeles Dodgers and Chicago White Sox in 2009, and Goodyear officials (with state money) are trying to lure the Colorado Rockies to the Phoenix area away from Tucson to share a spring training facility with the Cleveland Indians. And the Boston Red Sox will raise ticket prices by about 9% in 2008 — but that probably will not stop the Red Sox Nation from seeing games at Fenway, or end the franchise’s consecutive game sellout streak, which stands at 388. The only recent fly in the ointment in MLB’s incredible run for money came from Sarasota, Fla., where the local populace said no to funding upgrades to the Cincinnati Reds’ spring training facility.
Why is Selig bothering with a Mitchell paper on steroids and other banned substances in baseball, when his NFL counterparts — the retired Paul Tagliabue, and his replacement Roger Goodell — have not even thought about sanctioned reports? Perhaps Selig wants to clear the air, but the San Francisco Grand Jury that indicted Bonds, Soares in Albany, and other law enforcement officials, are doing Mitchell’s work. This is a law enforcement problem: It is not about cheating, as suggested by the president of the International Olympic Committee, Jacques Rogge. Speaking of Rogge, he was the first person to put the real heat on MLB. Rogge was threatening New York’s bid for the 2012 in March 2003, carping about how the Olympics’ drug testing standards and policies were much better than those of American professional sports leagues, and that if the leagues came around to Olympic-type testing and policies, New York’s chances of getting the 2012 Olympics would be substantially better. Insiders suggest a different story, though. Rogge may have been unhappy that Selig and the director of the MLB Players Association, Donald Fehr, were not delivering big name players to the Olympics. Despite the Mitchell report, a congressional hearing on steroids and other banned substances, and the Bonds indictment, the bottom line is that politicians, the corporate community, and baseball customers don’t care. They may talk a big game about how baseball is filled with cheats and drug users. But when it comes down to it, there is more money than ever flowing into the game. The baseball consumer has spoken.
evanjweiner@yahoo.com