Jewish World Review March 14, 2005 / 3 Adar I, 5765

Keith Olbermann

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Baseball's Watergate


http://www.NewsAndOpinion.com | One of the nation's most astute politicians once warned that it wasn't the crime that did you in, it was the cover-up. It was Richard Nixon, and he said it before Watergate, and unfortunately for him, he forgot it during Watergate.

Somebody should listen to his words now— and that somebody is the Commissioner of Baseball, Allan H. "Bud" Selig.

In its 125 years as a professional sport, his industry's leaders have made a lot of amazing mistakes. Three owners in New York mutually banned radio broadcasts of their teams' games in the '30s because they had concluded— in a precise inversion of reality— that those broadcasts would drain attendance. In the quarter century before Jackie Robinson, the leagues actively fought integration. And, warned in 1975 by an arbitrator to make a compromise with the players' union, because he was about to strike down the contract language that enabled them to keep their players as perpetually indentured servants, the owners told him to take a flying leap, that they'd challenge him in court and win and there'd never be free agency.

But, judged even against this backdrop of a century and a quarter of almost non-stop alternating near-sightedness and absolute blindness, baseball is making its worst mistake yet— it is threatening to challenge in court a Congressional Committee's right to subpoena seven players, three executives, and the union chief, to testify about steroid use.

You do not have to be a lawyer or an ethicist to realize that the arguments against the subpoenas are ludicrous. They're based on the premise that to possibly reveal the names of players who have used steroids or human growth hormone, illegally, without doctors' prescriptions, would violate a confidentiality agreement between the owners and the players' union. This premise is akin to organized crime leaders seeking to stop congressional testimony because it promised that it would keep the names of its hit men secret.

But even if baseball had a legitimate argument, it shouldn't use it. All it will accomplish by this defiance is to take what is still a relatively back-burner issue among its customers, and give it the appearance of a total stonewall, a complete cover-up, a four-alarm fire of guilty conscience that could not be more damaging than if it proved all the players of the last 20 years had been injected with steroids personally by Bud Selig himself.

Baseball is launching its own version of Watergate. Not the break-in, but the cover-up.

In 1920, the industry faced its greatest crisis. Evidence burst out of courtrooms and confessions that eight members of the Chicago White Sox had received bribes, or had guilty knowledge of those bribes, to deliberately lose the previous season's World Series to the Cincinnati Reds. With the thousand murmured rumors of game-fixing that dated back to the 1890's suddenly shouted aloud, the end of the sport in this country was foretold. The eight players were acquitted in court— under circumstances that were dubious at best. Yet the man appointed by the owners to the then-newly created office of Commissioner, Kenesaw Mountain Landis, expelled all eight players from the game— including at least three prospective Hall of Fame stars. And though the twin controversies— the game-fixing and especially the expulsions— linger to this day, the game not only survived, it grew exponentially.

Just fifteen years ago, another brave Commissioner, Bart Giamatti, permanently suspended the man who was probably the sport's most recognizable name, Pete Rose, after he confessed to gambling, and was accused of wagering on baseball, and even on the outcomes of his own team's games. Not a month has passed since, that Rose's status hasn't been loudly debated. And the game not only survived, but it again grew exponentially.

Yet steroids— which now cloud every towering home run, and thus the result of every game in every season since the late '80s— are not to be talked about under oath. What kind of message does this send to the fans? There can be only one: that steroid use, and management's knowledge of it, must be so pervasive that it is absolutely imperative to the survival of the sport, to keep any kind of confirmation that any player ever used any steroid, an absolute secret. Worse still, the secret must be more of an imperative than was the crookedness of the 1919 World Series, or the wagering habits of Pete Rose, or any of the other crises that the industry has faced since 1871. Baseball could sooner survive the revelation that Jose Canseco's accusations in his book "Juiced" were the mere tip of the iceberg, than it could the perception that it has something so big to hide. And if, as Curt Schilling of the Boston Red Sox fears, the Congressional inquiry turns into a "witch-hunt"? Baseball has not only survived witch-hunts— it has frequently conducted its own, and found witches of every stripe and kind imaginable. And it's always been stronger after the violators were revealed, and either rehabilitated or removed.

To prevent the testimony— to insist that not only should the chips not fall as they may, but that there never have been any chips— is to take the amorphous lingering doubt that irritates, but hardly disillusions the paying customer, and transform it into an overwhelming, assumed fact: because of steroid use, every baseball game can no longer be assumed to be on the level.

I spent more than 20 years as a sports reporter, most of them on the national level. I heard my first accusation of steroid use (ironically enough, against Jose Canseco), from another active player, in the winter of 1987. I had an eminent sports orthopedic surgeon tell me in 1991 that the sudden demise of the career of a seemingly invincible ballplayer due to a rare blood vessel problem could only have been caused by a long-standing hereditary issue that should have affected every male in his family for generations, or by the repeated injections of performance-enhancing drugs into a specific part of the body.

After that, a year didn't go by without similar tips and leads. None could be proved; each brought with it the threat of libel action. The sports media did its best, but without the most unshakable and unattainable of verifications— actual medical tests confirming steroid use— nothing could be reported.

And the baseball establishment heard all the same stories and did nothing, even as prominent figures went on-the-record with their own estimates and conclusions about the prevalence of the drugs in the sport. Yesterday, the House Government Reform Committee responded to baseball's threat to quash the subpoenas in court, in a detailed and damning letter. It noted that in 1995, Randy Smith, and then the General Manager of the San Diego Padres, told The Los Angeles Times that "We all know there's steroid use," and estimated its prevalence at 10 percent to 20 percent of all players. Five years later, the strength coach of the Colorado Rockies told The New York Times that he believed 30 percent of all players had used steroids at some point in their careers. Later estimates, by such players as the late Ken Caminiti and Chad Curtis, approached or exceeded 50 percent.

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The best baseball could (or would) do— with its players' union playing the role of the friend in the cliché to whom the guy desperately seeking to avoid the fistfight says "Hold me back, hold me back"— was institute a random testing policy designed merely to determine if there might be steroid use in the sport, without penalties to those who tested positive. Only this winter, after the leaked Grand Jury testimony from the so-called "Balco" case indicated Jason Giambi of the New York Yankees had, in exchange for immunity, admitted to using steroids and human growth hormone, did the industry even cobble together the gentlest of penalty schedules. An individual player would have to test positive four times before receiving a suspension of even one season's length.

Anybody who tested positive four times for a non-addictive drug should be banned for life, for sheer stupidity.

There are tremendous issues in play, of ethics, morality, and health— especially the health of children who use the drugs. But the one facing baseball between now and next Thursday's hearing is a lot baser than that. It is the same one it faced in the wake of the 1919 World Series scandal— decades of rumors of player corruption and management indifference. Then, the owners, after years of neglect, and without a players' union to hold them back, finally acted. Now, a pesky congressional committee has afforded the industry the rare opportunity to lance the boil created by the management-union symbiosis.

And the truth— whatever it is, and whoever it claims— cannot possibly be worse than the specter of baseball's owners and players, arch enemies since the first contract was drawn up, finally colluding to insure that the truth must be suppressed at all cost.

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The writer hosts MSNBC's “Countdown with Keith Olbermann.” The news program, dedicated to all of the day’s top stories, telecasts weeknights, 8-9 p.m. ET. Comment by clicking here.



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