Are you sure the salary increases would not have come even with testing. I don’t really accept your reasoning that preventing testing led to the salary increases. Obviously the Union has done a great job in keeping salaries increasing, but why would it have been lesser is drug testing was in place?
The ones that successfully cheated benefited financially. Giambi would be a good and easy example. But how did his cheating help an honest player whose 10 homers a year now looked unimportant in the juiced up game? It seems like salaries would have went up for all the players with or without testing and that the cheats just got a bigger share of the pie.
Sosa got better when he entered his prime, and worse when he exited it. Shocking. Is Jeremy Giambi a good example of how steroids helped too? There is no evidence that on a whole steroids increase performance. Look at the list of people on the Mitchell report. The entire list. Did the majority of those guys have spikes in performance? They did not.
I don’t know, and neither did the union. They protected what they had. In the 90s, MLB’s popularity and revenue were going up and player salaries increased. They had no reason to jeopardize that.
Look at the growth in average salaries and the minimum salary.
Destroyed their bodies like who exactly? Sammy Sosa?
So in other words, we have no evidence that steroids make you a better player, but some guys got better that we have no evidence took steroids? You’ll have to explain it to me further because I don’t get it.
Sammy Sosa was a power hitter in the home run era. Home runs sold tickets and that’s what MLB encouraged at the time. I’m pretty sure there is evidence that the balls were harder back in the 90s and early 00s.
This was also the era that baseball began perceiving itself as a strongman competition to defeat the other team by huge point margins (like football) instead of an endurance game eked out by scrawny guys playing the probabilities (like soccer). It is no wonder a lot of guys got muscular real quick and started hitting lots of home runs. The guys who didn’t washed out of baseball. I’m sure steroids were a part of it, but they were a symptom, not the cause.
It is negociation. Each side says things that they eventually cave on. If the owners wanted it they could probably have had it at the concession of something else. It was obviously not a very important issue to the owners.
The union’d job to act in the best interest of its player. Sure health and safety are part of it, but so are many other factors including privacy and money. Besides the plans of the owners or congress for that matter weren’t about health and safety. If they were they would have spent a lot less time on punishment, and a lot more time and money on education and fostering dialogue. Make it less about gotcha and more about prevention and you would have more union support.
While the owners were full steam ahead?
Would you be okay if they tested for recreation drugs at your work place?
I think drug testing makes sense in an environment where there are public safety issues. Say for a cop or pilot. With baseball there is no such public safety issue.
Like Ken Caminiti, who died at age 41. Do we have to review the deleterious long-term effects of anabolic steroids on human health?
We have evidence that Sammy Sosa took steroids. It isn’t evidence that would hold up in court, but we aren’t in court. Sammy Sosa went from a skinny 20-year-old rookie with the White Sox to a muscle-bound, acne-scarred 30-year-old slugger with the Cubs to a skinny washed-up 34-year-old with the Orioles. I didn’t blow in off the turnip truck. He was taking steroids.
Mark McGwire took steroids (he has admitted) and got better. Barry Bonds took steroids (he has admitted, although he denies that he knew what he was doing–yeah right) and got better. Alex Rodriguez took steroids (he has admitted) and got better–and he was pretty damn good to begin with. Connect the dots.
Odd, I recall blaming the owners too; I just said the Union had the greatest fault. I did not excuse the owners.
You really enjoy parsing don’t you?
Actually I would be OK with drug testing it as it has been a condition of employment for every job I have had since I was 18. I am not claiming I like it and I will state that I would prefer if drugs were legal so they could be taxed and we could reduce drug related crime and violence but it is not that uncommon.
If a cop or pilot shows signs that they can no longer safely do their jobs, they need to be fired, regardless of what substances they are ingesting. If they do their jobs safely and properly, it doesn’t matter even if they are hard core meth addicts in their free time.
I am in favor of letting adult athletes use whatever substances they can get their hands on. I see no fundamental difference between banned chemicals and any other effort to improve performance. Were I in charge there would be no such proscription. As it happens, there is.
However I do not understand why a player should not be “blamed” for steroid use simply because of the allure of money or some innate drive to perform or any other excuse for cheating.
That’s a ridiculous argument. It is a choice to cheat and the responsibility for cheating in exchange for self-gratification falls to the cheater.
Yep. And Bonds never hit as many as 50 homers before he hit 73…at age 36, in his 16th ML season and the start of a 4-year run of winning the MVP. Imagine that–he hadn’t won one prior to that since he was 28, then runs off a string of *4 in a row *starting at age 36. His first and only batting titles during that same stretch, by the way, the last one at age 39. For some reason, it became easier to get around on balls later in his career, when that skill starts to deteriorate for most guys.
The effect that steroids has produced on some players is undeniable. I don’t need to have seen them injecting the stuff to draw a reasonable conclusion.
The Union stopped players from volunteering to be tested. It stopped the mini-rebellion of the team where all 25 players were going to fail by not taking the test to ensure testing would go into effect in the future. The Union strong arms players into not taking less money to play where they really want to. The union enabled many players to cheat safely increasing the pressure on other players to cheat to keep up.
If I hire you, Jim, to represent me, and I authorize you to be a total self-serving prick on my behalf, while I go around telling the press “I just love to play the game, I don’t know nuthin’ 'bout 'nuthin, I just loves me some baseball,” am I any less of a self-serving prick?
I guess I am but I also believe that there is no way 750+ players are in agreement on this issue and the Union has successfully cowed, cajoled, and controlled dissenters.