This past Tuesday evening, T.J. Quinn, Pedro Gomez and Mike Fish of ESPN’s Outside the Lines reported that MLB will seek to suspend a couple of its biggest stars, not to mention quite a few other significant players, in the very near future. This is big news for a couple reasons. Good teams and great players have their seasons at stake right now. Fantasy teams too! Oh, and this investigation may well culminate in the biggest drug bust in North American professional sports’ history.
At the heart of this investigation is Biogenesis, a now-shuttered firm that may or may not have fed players performance enhancing drugs. Now, it should be noted that Bud Selig and his associated warlords owners have been going hard after Biogenesis for many moons. They just hadn’t gotten anywhere – until now. What happened is this: the founder of Biogenesis, Tony Bosch, has reportedly agreed to cooperate with MLB and name names. In a completely unrelated story, Bosch is a disgraced and bankrupt charlatan who can’t afford to go to court with MLB, who sued him in March.
This isn’t a witch hunt, per se, because in this case there are almost certainly witches to be found. It is however hardly self-evident why MLB would want to expose the witches at all. Why is Bud Selig suddenly so hellbent on trying to flush out those still using PEDs? Why is MLB so determined, to use Jonah Keri’s words, “to mount players’ heads on a wall”? Why so much fuss now that the sport is both profitable and popular, with few dark clouds on the horizon?
Keri provides an insightful answer:
Overall, it appears that this investigation is an overzealous reaction to all that has happened before. Fifteen, 20 years ago, the league and mainstream media were both content to let players smash home runs and fire 97-mph fastballs while said players consumed performance-enhancing substances; the league hadn’t properly codified which substances were allowed and which ones were not, while the media wrote fawning profiles of players who were later found to have used. No one likes to get duped, especially publicly. So we got an onslaught of hysterical articles slamming the league and its players for the spread of PED use. And now we have a league determined to beat back any criticism of its policies, even if it means suspending minor leaguers with flimsy evidence because they can’t defend themselves, firing arbitrators for making honest decisions with which the league didn’t agree, and building cases based largely on the testimony of a broke alleged drug dealer.
All of this reads like a man who seems determined to change his legacy from being the commissioner under whom everybody took steroids to the commissioner who cleaned up baseball.
Bud Selig is nothing if not obsessed with how he’ll be remembered. As I write, he is beginning the process of settling down in the history department at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he’ll be able to oversee a project that shapes the history of his tenure. I’ve now seen the man speak in person twice – once at a hackneyed Q&A, the other at a luncheon in which he regaled his listeners with all of the accomplishments he has overseen as commissioner. Selig wants to be remembered as the Greatest Commissioner of All Time. He wants to be remembered the way we remember Hank Aaron.
And so now he’s trying to tie up loose ends before he goes – to tie up the loose end that threatens to derail his entire legacy. Yes, he has shepherded baseball into Asia and South America, started the World Baseball Classic, and re-triggered the league’s outreach into urban black communities. Yes, he has led the league from intense labor strife to relative labor peace. And yes, he has overseen the construction of countless new and shiny stadia, the introduction of ridiculously lucrative television deals, and the realization of profits that this season could reach $9 billion. His accomplishments, at least when measured against the standard of what commissioners are supposed to do, are admittedly impressive.
But nobody will remember any of that, Selig fears. All they’ll remember are the drugs. All they’ll remember are the false records. All they’ll remember, worst of all, is that Bud Selig canceled the 1994 World Series and then looked the other way as Mark McGwire, Sammy Sosa, and Barry Bonds helped bring the fans back with their bulging biceps and towering home runs.* So yeah, Ryan Braun is probably going down.
There is a risk here, though its more abstract than practical. Keri warns that Selig and the owners risk flushing 20 years of labor peace down the drain with their obsessive hunt to bring down a few scapegoats, but I’m not sure I agree with that. As Buster Olney points out, “players who choose to cheat have effectively chosen to try to take jobs and money illicitly from other union members.” It’s very likely that many players, the vast majority of whom are clean, will support Selig’s efforts in principle. I doubt the risk here is labor strife: there’s just too much at stake at this point.
Rather, the risk is to the game itself. In the end, Bud Selig’s quest to clean up baseball is myopic, and ultimately doomed. He’ll never succeed in wiping away the stain of PEDs, and if we’re smart, the stain they have left upon his rein as commissioner. If anything, the latest hullabaloo actually threatens to connect his legacy even more forcefully with that stain. And that’s not even the dumbest, worst part. “The worst possible outcome from all of this,” Alex Pareene writes, “won’t be 100-game suspensions for nearly two dozen players (unless you’re a Brewers fan, obviously), but another round of kangaroo court hearings and idiotic prosecutions, designed around protecting the “sanctity” of a lucrative money-making venture involving adult millionaires.” That, and the continuing destruction of a handful of minor leaguers’ lives who, without a union, have no civil protection from MLB and its legions of lawyers.
This is all richly ironic, and not in the good way. Selig and his cronies care as little about the integrity of baseball as the players using PEDs do. Nobody talked about the integrity of the game – or of its tradition – when Selig began the wild card, and introduced inter-league play, and made the idiotic, executive decision to hitch home-field advantage in the World Series to the outcome of an exhibition game. We certainly didn’t hear anything about the integrity of the game as big-market team after big-market team signed soon-to-be-antiquated tv deals, shielding them from the vicissitudes of their personnel decisions, or after the new CBA limited the reach of small-market teams in the draft. That’s because nobody here actually cares about the integrity of the game – not the players, not the owners, not Selig.
Indeed, when you think about it, nobody ever talks about the integrity of the game unless their own interests are at stake. That’s pretty sad, but it’s nothing if not predictable, integrity be damned.
*And all I’ll remember are the bulging veins in baby boomers’ heads as they struggled to explain just how morally fucked up it was to see their heroes’ records get smashed by newer heroes.
