No surprise at baseball's latest steroid scandal
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Players will do anything to stay in a fantasy world we have helped create
COMMENTARY
By Ron Borges
NBCSports.com contributor
Updated: 2:47 p.m. ET June 7, 2006
Remember a few years back when professional athletes all started wearing Band-aids across their noses because some nitwit told them it would improve their breathing and hence their performance? Next thing you knew, everybody in sports looked liked they'd just finished sparring with Mike Tyson.
So why are we surprised to learn some baseball players are using human growth hormones now that Major League Baseball is testing for other forms of performance-enhancing drugs?
Remember guys like New England Patriots quarterback Tom Brady wearing eye black to cut down the sun's glare even when the game was being played indoors?
So why are we surprised to learn baseball players have been slugging down amphetamines with their coffee the way cops wolf down donuts with theirs just to keep alert and active during a long season?
There should be no sense of shock, or even moderate surprise, any more at the most recent revelations involving Arizona Diamondbacks' pitcher Jason Grimsley and a shipment of HGH received by him at his Scottsdale, Ariz., home on April 19, which came to light after federal agents raided his house for six hours Tuesday. That raid came barely a month after he had originally cooperated in an on-going investigation into the use of illegal performance-enhancing drugs in baseball, then had backed out.
The participants in America's pastime more and more seem to be swallowing chemicals originally intended to fatten up livestock in hopes of fattening their own careers. To believe the threat of “random” testing would prevent people willing to put Band-aids on their noses in hope of improving their performance from taking drugs they know will improve their performance is laughable.
This latest revelation about a journeyman pitcher's sad journey into the use of human growth hormones, amphetamines, steroids and any other manner of performance-enhancing drug he could think of is not shocking. It is predictable. Just as it's predictable to say Grimsley is not the only one. Not the only one on his team and not the only one in his league.
Hopefully Major League Baseball's suits and its defenders in the media will spare us the requisite phony outrage and the empty promises of renewed vigilance. The genie is out of the bottle in baseball and so is the dope, and the only thing that will reverse that is the cleansing light of truth.
Not even fans as naive as Bud Selig — the blind-eyed commissioner of baseball who wants you to believe he never saw it coming — or as uncaring as Donald Fehr — whose union for so long opposed steroid testing in baseball and whose members are now paying for it by being under constant suspicion both of past usage by some and continued usage by others — can continue to live in denial of this: Baseball players have soiled themselves for years and are just as willing to do it today because many of them would do anything to live one more season in the lap of baseball luxury.
We have made these people God-like figures. They are paid as if they are actually doing something important. We write about them as if their work will decide the fate of our union or contribute mightily to our society. Why should we be surprised to learn some of them will do anything to cling to that lifestyle, including lose their dignity and their honesty?
When Rafael Palmeiro wagged his finger at Congress and said that, unlike the Jason Giambis of the world, he was no drug abuser, we accepted him at his word when athletes had long ago lost the right to be given such a pass. When Palmeiro later tested positive, he slinked off into whatever well-furnished cave he's now living in, and the debate became not about his willingness to lie boldly in public and what that said about the nature of the environment he was living in, but rather whether he would still make the Hall of Fame. Are you kidding me?
Then, when Palmeiro tried unsuccessfully to come back to baseball after a 10-day suspension, who spoke up for him in Baltimore?
A former player representative named Jason Grimsley.
Hypocrisy does not reside solely in Congress and the White House, you see. There's plenty of it in the clubhouse, too.
At the time of Palmerio's shameful return eight months ago, Grimsley said, “There are steps being made and things being done to fix (the drug problem in Major League Baseball). I think the people in Major League Baseball's office and in Capitol Hill see the efforts that are being made to change things.”
On April 19, Grimsley made that change public when he got caught accepting two packages of human growth hormone, a performance-enhancing drug that is illegal but for which there is no known test to prove its usage. Efforts were being made to change things, all right. Change the prescription. People, unfortunately, don't change so easily.
It's important to say, Grimsley has not been charged with any crime.
When federal agents, including the lead investigator in the BALCO case that exposed Giambi as a cheat and implied Gary Sheffield and Barry Bonds were among many others as well, showed up at Grimsley's door that day in April and nabbed him, Grimsley rolled over on his former teammates and soon to become ex-friends quicker than Fido rolls over for a belly rub, according to a sworn statement by federal agent Jeff Novitzky. Among the things Novitzky claimed May 31 when he sought a search warrant to enter the chemically enhanced pitcher's house was that Grimsley agreed to fully cooperate April 19, not only voluntarily turning over his two HGH “kits” (which is a season-long supply of the performance-enhancing drugs) but also turning over the names of other athletes he thought used both steroids and amphetamines as well as telling the investigators how they were supplied.
Just as in the shady world of Tony Soprano, there's no oath of “omerta” any more. Everyone's talking. After they get caught. That's baseball's real dirty little secret, but it won't stay secret for long.
How long before the blacked out names of Grimsley's fellow cheats and former teammates come to light? How soon before they raid the “Latin players” he identified as “a major source for the amphetamines within baseball,”' according to the search warrant? How long, as the preachers used to say? Not long.
It's all going to come out, so Major League Baseball needs to make a hard decision. Does it want to continue to commit suicide by butterknife, letting the drip, drip, drip of these kind of incidents and allegations eat away at their sport, or do they finally do what always works in America? Come clean with all the facts about juiced players, juiced records and failed testing.
Just because Selig says they have a testing system that's working doesn't mean it's working the way he implies it is. Maybe the testing system is working to do what organizations too often try to do when the heat's on: to limit the damage rather than clean up the problem.
Regardless of testing, Grimsley didn't seem too worried April 19 when that package arrived with a season's supply of HGH. Do you really believe any more that he's the only one?
Baseball has not earned anyone's trust in this. What it has earned is an atmosphere where everyone is guilty until proven innocent and a sport where again and again federal agents are going to show up at people's doorsteps and take them away or paw through their home looking for proof they're another cheater. When they find it, the guy will roll over on somebody else just like Grimsley apparently did because professional athletes don't live in a world where you take responsibility for your actions. They live in the world we writers, TV reporters and fans created for them. The live in a land of Oz, where fiction is truth and everyone is afraid to look behind the curtain.
Testing cannot make that go away, especially since there remain performance-enhancing drugs that cannot be detected and players willing to risk anything to live in Oz for one more season.
*Ron Borges writes regularly for MSNBC.com and covers the NFL and boxing for the Boston Globe.
URL: msnbc.msn.com |
