Just curious: Why is it so difficult to impose a hard-and-fast rule on steroid use in sports? If it were up to me, I’d say random testing, you come up dirty, you get two retests on the following consecutive days just in case it was a false positive. Come up dirty all three times, and your career’s over. What’s so difficult about this?
And this might be a silly follow-up question, but why didn’t the MLB have decent testing rules before this government investigation? You could tell Bud Selig was sweating bullets at the inquiry.
Well, ending their career for a single offense seems a little harsh. And the Players’ Union probably feels the same way. Random tests could also be interpreted as a breach of privacy. How much privacy ballplayers deserve in this area is a matter of opinion.
Because testing for steroids couldn’t possibly benifit the business of baseball. Find no evidence of use, and they’ve gained nothing and lost nothing. Find evidence of use, and they’ve lost a heck of a lot, not the least of which are respectibility and credibility. That could easily cause a loss in revenue. Better to not disturb the issue at all.
Loopus has done an excellent job answering this and I couldn’t have made his points half as well.
I will add that another factor is that baseball simply did not perceive that steroids would affect the sport. Unlike, say, swimming or sprinting or weightlifting, the connection between raw physical strength and baseball skill is not entirely predictable. Bo Jackson, who was immensely strong, was a marginal major league player; Hank Aaron, who hit more home runs than any other player in the history of the sport, weighed 175 pounds in his prime and wasn’t unusually strong at all. I’m sure you could come up with a zillion comparisons like that; if you put Gabe Kapler next to Willie Mays, Kapler would look like a Greek god and Mays would look like a shrimp, but the only way Kapler’s ever going to end up next to Mays in the Hall of Fame is if he buys a ticket. Becoming stronger may have no effect at all on your baseball ability if you have a big hole in your swing.
In fact, is is only quite recently that ballplayers even began lifting weights to any significant degree. Right up until the 1980s it was still considered a bad idea for a pro ballplayer to train with weights, and players who engaged in strenuous workout programs were perceieved as being weird. Managers would openly criticize players who tried to add muscle mass (yes, I’m serious.) ALL players today are visibly bigger than their counterparts 30 years ago; even those who aren’t roiding are working on the Nautilus machines. 30 years ago few players did that sort of thing. Fifty years ago pretty much all ballplayers trained all winter on hamburgers and beer.
The widespread revolution in baseball in weight training is really something that’s only happened in the last twenty years at most - really, the last fifteen. So prior to not too long ago, baseball didn’t concern itself with steroids because there just weren’t very many guys who were adding a lot of muscle.
I would imagine you will find this is true of most sports that have had to deal with steroids; they probably took a while to react to the fact that steroids could be changing the result.
There is clear scientific and medical evidence that prolonged use of steroids has negative physical effects, and those effects can be exacerbated when the steroids are abused – that is, taken in higher doses than would normally be prescribed.
There is at least anecdotal evidence already that baseball players suspected of (and admitting to) using steroids have suffered siginificant decreases in their performance, and some appear to have had their careers cut short as a result.
From a business perspective, baseball players are the principal assets of a team. Letting your star players self destruct is a bad thing, and the fact that the owners don’t understand that just boggles the mind.
There are plenty of philosophical answers, but the practical answer is because any drug testing policy was a matter of collective bargaining, and baseball has a strong union that has objected to testing. Again, the idea that allowing its members to abuse steroids is in their best interest is ludicrous.