During the Great Home Run Chase of ’98, Bud Selig seemed the real-life Louis Renault, the police chief in “Casablanca.” When Louis needed to close Rick’s nightclub, he protested he was, “shocked, SHOCKED, to find that gambling is going on in here.”
A waiter then handed him money. “Your winnings, sir,” the waiter said.
Said Louis: “Thank you very much.”
In 1998, the commissioner led the cheers and his sport pocketed the money as Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa hit home run after outrageous home run. Their pursuit of 61 and beyond was deemed great for the Grand Old Game, even as some among us wondered if something mightn’t be so grand. (A bottle of Androstenedione, banned by the Olympics and the NFL, was spotted in McGwire’s locker by an Associated Press reporter.)
When Barry Bonds mocked the sport by hitting 73 homers only three years later, Selig was in backpedal mode. He wasn’t on hand when Bonds broke McGwire’s record. Soon Major League Baseball would see the greatest players of a generation — Bonds, McGwire, Sosa, Roger Clemens, Andy Pettitte, Rafael Palmeiro — hauled into court or called to Capitol Hill to testify about steroids.
Having taken far too long to face grim reality, MLB is now acting as Johnnys-come-lately-to-righteousness do: It’s overreacting. The commissioner who once looked the other way is recalling another cinematic icon — Inspector Jacques Clouseau of the “Pink Panther” series. Selig is so determined to root out performance-enhancing drugs that he doesn’t care how many cars he crashes into swimming pools.
This week ESPN’s “Outside the Lines” reported that baseball will attempt to suspend 20 players connected to the now-defunct Miami-area clinic Biogenesis in America. Its star witness will be Biogenesis owner Tony Bosch, who earlier this year MLB sued for “tortious interference.” In his only public interview since the scandal broke, Bosch told ESPN he had “been falsely accused.”
Now he’s about to be the chief witness against the likes of Alex Rodriguez (three-time MVP), Ryan Braun (2011 National League MVP) and Melky Cabrera (2012 All-Star game MVP). A source told ESPN that MLB might seek to impose 100-game penalties on some of these famous names, 100 games being the standard for a second offense.
But think about that. Cabrera was suspended last season for 50 games after testing positive. Would MLB count the same transgression twice? A-Rod admitted in 2009 that he took steroids earlier in the decade, but MLB didn’t suspend for positive tests back then. Braun tested positive in October of his MVP season, but the 50-game suspension was overturned by a 2-1 vote of an arbitration panel. Can there be a “second offense” if the first didn’t stick?
From the “Outside The Lines” report: “The argument, the source said, is the players’ connection to Bosch constitutes one offense, and previous statements to MLB officials denying any such connection or the use of PEDs constitute another.”
As you might have heard, players have a strong union. They ceded a bit of their once-immense leverage in the effort to prove to the public that not every one of them is juicing. (A player doesn’t need to test positive to be suspended; he can now be docked for “use and possession” of PEDs — as happened to Jordan Schafer when he was a Braves minor-leaguer in 2008.)
But is Bosch’s latest word grounds enough to suspend somebody? Are code names on some documents in his possession? Will double penalties withstand the challenges sure to be raised by the Players Association?
A bigger question: Do we trust MLB to get anything right? This, after all, is the sport that let its All-Star game end in a tie. It’s also the sport that couldn’t make Braun’s suspension stick because the test-sample collector waited until Monday morning to drop by FedEx.
The Braun mess was especially galling. He plays for the Milwaukee Brewers — the team Selig used to own in the city where he still lives. (Independent arbitrator Shyam Das was canned by MLB soon after casting the deciding vote for Braun.) The zeal of the sport to purge itself of PEDs is to be commended, but sometimes zeal overrides due process.
Bit by bit, baseball is winning the fight against PEDs. (How do we know? Miguel Cabrera led the majors with 44 homers last season, 29 fewer than Bonds hit in 2001.) The fear here is that, in trying to leave a shining legacy of righted wrongs, a commissioner approaching retirement will press so hard he tears a healing sport asunder.
