Peace Talks Simple Compared With Steroids
By HARVEY ARATON
Sports of the Times
June 26, 2007
The time has come to wrap it up, Senator Mitchell. More than scoring a sit-down with Barry Bonds, closure is your calling. With all due appreciation and respect, investigating steroid use in baseball should not be taking anywhere near as much of your time as — for comparison’s sake — brokering peace in Northern Ireland.
You have been at it for 15 months now, banging your wise, distinguished head against the players’ wall of silence. And what does the conditional deliverance of Jason Giambi by the commissioner, Bud Selig, really do? It mocks the process more than demonstrates that what you are conducting here is a potent investigation.
Given the rate of disclosure and your lack of subpoena power, there was always a limit to what you were going to uncover without government intervention. On the positive side, there is also a limit to what you need to know in order to say what must inevitably, above all, be said.
Pretty much, it seems to me, the same things as the last time you ran this drill for an athletic enterprise with mud on its cleats and guilt in its eyes. And isn’t it amazing how you managed to investigate Olympic corruption of planetary proportions for the United States Olympic Committee in three measly months?
“We found responsibility at all levels,” you told Jim Lehrer on the “The NewsHour” in March 1999.
You railed against an “improper culture” that took root in the Olympic movement and produced the backroom payoffs and other improprieties that were revealed before the 2002 Winter Games in Salt Lake City.
You said that “the culture expanded and an attitude of ‘everybody’s doing it and so we have to participate otherwise we might be at a competitive disadvantage’ took hold.”
You also came to the conclusion that what was “particularly sad and tragic” was that the Salt Lake organizers “didn’t need to stoop to this level to win the Games.”
Can’t all those things be said about baseball and its willful ignorance of a performance-enhancement mentality that seized hold of the game perhaps as early as the late 1980s, but certainly by the middle of the 1990s?
Shouldn’t a report on what changed the major league culture address how baseball betrayed its core principles in the aftermath of the World Series-killing players’ strike of 1994? That particularly sad and tragic was the sense of foreboding in baseball that it wasn’t hip and sexy enough to maintain its position as America’s pastime in the channel-surfing and Internet age?
Senator, I hope that you, as a loyal fan and a Red Sox director, will take a few paragraphs in your report to demythologize the belief that Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa saved baseball with their now largely discredited or questioned assault on Roger Maris’s season home run record.
•
Remind the commissioner and the owners that the World Series drew a higher network television rating in 1995 than in 1993 or 1998 and every year since chicks supposedly started digging the long ball. Tell them that baseball didn’t need to have the game bastardized by the muscle bound in order for the fans to forgive.
That should have been abundantly clear during the poststrike season when Cal Ripken Jr., bearing down on and finally breaking Lou Gehrig’s record of 2,131 consecutive games played, was treated like an immortal by fans everywhere — and by opposing players, for that matter — for merely showing up to play.
Such was baseball’s ultimate appeal, its men-at-work ethos that perhaps resonates even more in a less predictable, more unstable 21st century.
Beyond the titillating game of gotcha that will outlast your investigation, Senator, as well as Bonds’s time in a baseball uniform, is the “responsibility at all levels” for the sellout of baseball’s greatest asset and appeal. Its most shameful offense — again, on all levels — was a decade of denial that steroids even existed, not the failure to eradicate them, which no one else has.
Senator, you said of the Salt Lake Olympic organizers: “They did not invent the culture. It was already flourishing.” While such thinking doesn’t excuse cheats, it does establish a context for how to deal with Bonds as he approaches Hank Aaron’s career home run record that so many people — perhaps yourself — are loathe to see him break.
Don’t hold out to make Bonds your investigation’s trophy, the head Selig doesn’t deserve to have mounted on his wall. Don’t play that game because Bonds — record notwithstanding — is not baseball. He did not invent the culture, and more names are coming, and some of them are bound to be players much more likable than he is.
You said after issuing your Olympic report, “A lot of good people simply got involved in a way that they thought they were doing something good, but the means that were being used were not good.”
•
By and large, I’m betting a majority of baseball fans would accept this broad accounting, along with a baseball-wide apology. Maybe you could instruct the players to take a long look at the union leadership that led them into this quagmire — in particular Donald Fehr, your former Olympic commission colleague — and make recommendations on how to frame the records established in the nontesting era.
Most of whatever you suggest will no doubt be called brilliant by baseball people, and subsequently ignored. You, more than anyone, had to know this would never be as gratifying a mission as brokering peace in a warring land. Senator, my advice is to pin a medal on Giambi for being baseball’s lonely honest man, issue your report as soon as you can and go back to addressing world horrors even more pressing than the chemically enhanced outbreak of homers.
Sports of the Times
June 26, 2007
The time has come to wrap it up, Senator Mitchell. More than scoring a sit-down with Barry Bonds, closure is your calling. With all due appreciation and respect, investigating steroid use in baseball should not be taking anywhere near as much of your time as — for comparison’s sake — brokering peace in Northern Ireland.
You have been at it for 15 months now, banging your wise, distinguished head against the players’ wall of silence. And what does the conditional deliverance of Jason Giambi by the commissioner, Bud Selig, really do? It mocks the process more than demonstrates that what you are conducting here is a potent investigation.
Given the rate of disclosure and your lack of subpoena power, there was always a limit to what you were going to uncover without government intervention. On the positive side, there is also a limit to what you need to know in order to say what must inevitably, above all, be said.
Pretty much, it seems to me, the same things as the last time you ran this drill for an athletic enterprise with mud on its cleats and guilt in its eyes. And isn’t it amazing how you managed to investigate Olympic corruption of planetary proportions for the United States Olympic Committee in three measly months?
“We found responsibility at all levels,” you told Jim Lehrer on the “The NewsHour” in March 1999.
You railed against an “improper culture” that took root in the Olympic movement and produced the backroom payoffs and other improprieties that were revealed before the 2002 Winter Games in Salt Lake City.
You said that “the culture expanded and an attitude of ‘everybody’s doing it and so we have to participate otherwise we might be at a competitive disadvantage’ took hold.”
You also came to the conclusion that what was “particularly sad and tragic” was that the Salt Lake organizers “didn’t need to stoop to this level to win the Games.”
Can’t all those things be said about baseball and its willful ignorance of a performance-enhancement mentality that seized hold of the game perhaps as early as the late 1980s, but certainly by the middle of the 1990s?
Shouldn’t a report on what changed the major league culture address how baseball betrayed its core principles in the aftermath of the World Series-killing players’ strike of 1994? That particularly sad and tragic was the sense of foreboding in baseball that it wasn’t hip and sexy enough to maintain its position as America’s pastime in the channel-surfing and Internet age?
Senator, I hope that you, as a loyal fan and a Red Sox director, will take a few paragraphs in your report to demythologize the belief that Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa saved baseball with their now largely discredited or questioned assault on Roger Maris’s season home run record.
•
Remind the commissioner and the owners that the World Series drew a higher network television rating in 1995 than in 1993 or 1998 and every year since chicks supposedly started digging the long ball. Tell them that baseball didn’t need to have the game bastardized by the muscle bound in order for the fans to forgive.
That should have been abundantly clear during the poststrike season when Cal Ripken Jr., bearing down on and finally breaking Lou Gehrig’s record of 2,131 consecutive games played, was treated like an immortal by fans everywhere — and by opposing players, for that matter — for merely showing up to play.
Such was baseball’s ultimate appeal, its men-at-work ethos that perhaps resonates even more in a less predictable, more unstable 21st century.
Beyond the titillating game of gotcha that will outlast your investigation, Senator, as well as Bonds’s time in a baseball uniform, is the “responsibility at all levels” for the sellout of baseball’s greatest asset and appeal. Its most shameful offense — again, on all levels — was a decade of denial that steroids even existed, not the failure to eradicate them, which no one else has.
Senator, you said of the Salt Lake Olympic organizers: “They did not invent the culture. It was already flourishing.” While such thinking doesn’t excuse cheats, it does establish a context for how to deal with Bonds as he approaches Hank Aaron’s career home run record that so many people — perhaps yourself — are loathe to see him break.
Don’t hold out to make Bonds your investigation’s trophy, the head Selig doesn’t deserve to have mounted on his wall. Don’t play that game because Bonds — record notwithstanding — is not baseball. He did not invent the culture, and more names are coming, and some of them are bound to be players much more likable than he is.
You said after issuing your Olympic report, “A lot of good people simply got involved in a way that they thought they were doing something good, but the means that were being used were not good.”
•
By and large, I’m betting a majority of baseball fans would accept this broad accounting, along with a baseball-wide apology. Maybe you could instruct the players to take a long look at the union leadership that led them into this quagmire — in particular Donald Fehr, your former Olympic commission colleague — and make recommendations on how to frame the records established in the nontesting era.
Most of whatever you suggest will no doubt be called brilliant by baseball people, and subsequently ignored. You, more than anyone, had to know this would never be as gratifying a mission as brokering peace in a warring land. Senator, my advice is to pin a medal on Giambi for being baseball’s lonely honest man, issue your report as soon as you can and go back to addressing world horrors even more pressing than the chemically enhanced outbreak of homers.
posted by greenpagan at 7:40 PM
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