I’m going to be upfront and honest about this. There’s really only one thing about baseball’s “steroids era” that really and truly bothers me, and that’s that more Royals didn’t jump on the PED bandwagon when they could. I mean, our team dong record has sat at 36 for over 25 years, for crying out loud. A couple trips to BALCO and maybe Bob “The Hammer” Hamlin could have put a 50 on the board.
OK, I’m not REALLY advocating illegal drug use, here. But the truth is that the fact some of these guys were using PEDs when there was no MLB testing policy against it really doesn’t bother me that much. Perhaps I’m being a bit laissez faire about all of this, but my supposition is that players in most eras have done things (or would, if they could) out of the realm of what’s natural to try to enhance their performance. If you’ve read Jim Bouton’s masterpiece “Ball Four,” you’ll see that players in the late 1960s were popping “greenies” like candy, and if they weren’t actually helping them to play better, they at least clearly thought they were.
I’m glad there’s a testing policy now, and I’m glad the game has gotten cleaner. I just don’t see the point in running the last generation through the mud. We enjoyed them as players, and the league didn’t give two squirts about what they were using at the time. We can’t have our cake and eat it, too. Hold guys to the standards of the time, and for this particular period of the game, using PEDs were a viable, and, arguably, perfectly LEGAL option, as far as the MLB was concerned.
That brings us to the more difficult side of the coin: the criminal justice realm. Guys that used steroids, more often than not, broke the law at one time or another. They used illegal drugs. They used illegal or immoral means to acquire them. This part is not up for debate—the government has a legal right to prosecute alleged criminals for their actions.
But none of these athletes are actually getting prosecuted for actually USING performance enhancing drugs. Rather, they’re all getting indicted for LYING about their (alleged) drug use. That’s what they’ve got on them—perjury. Contempt. Obstruction of justice. We (you and I) have spent MILLIONS of dollars building cases against athletes to prove that they didn’t tell the truth about their behavior that was allowed by their employer.
You might have seen in the news that the feds have reduced the number of felony charges against Barry Bonds from 11 to five. If Barry is convicted, and if the judge pays attention to federal sentencing guidelines for guys like Barry with no previous felony convictions, Bonds stands to spend somewhere between 15 and 21 months in federal prison.
15 to 21 months? Are you kidding me? There are federal employees who have personally made hundreds of thousands of dollars in salary for the time they’ve billed while building this case for years, and we’re talking about 15 to 21 months in jail? Bare in mind, there’s a guy named Anderson who (allegedly) provided Barry with his drugs in the first place, and he’s sat in jail for roughly that long for refusing to testify against his buddy, Barry.
Don’t get me wrong—I believe Bonds is a world-class A-hole, and I don’t feel even one ounce of sorrow for him and his plight. Mama taught me to tell the truth and be responsible for my actions. But it infuriates me that MY GOVERNMENT thinks this is a big enough deal to waste this much time, effort and resources for the possibility that the guy walks after less than two years in jail—if they manage to convict him AT ALL (a pretty sketchy proposition, when their key witness is happy sitting in jail, rather than testifying).
My sentiments to the feds on this one mirror the ones I send out to all my fellow baseball geeks enraged about the steroid era: Let it go, guys. It’s just not worth it.
No comments:
Post a Comment