Major League Baseball is finally trying to clean up the sport and it’s doing it with the seriousness that should have been there 10 years ago when the Mitchell Report came out.
This isn’t a matter of too little too late, because the iron fist of Bug Selig is coming down hard on steroid cheats. It is just should have come down much sooner than it did.
There’s a reason why we have so many steroid users in the game: There just wasn’t a big enough incentive to not do it. The drug tests weren’t there and when they arrived, they were woefully ineffective.
Punishments were slow in coming and a player could risk getting caught if it meant serving a mere 25 game suspension.
But with the Biogenesis scandal, Selig and MLB are throwing the book at everyone caught up in the scandal.
Ryan Braun was booted for the season — a remarkable 60-plus game suspension. Miguel Tejada received the third-longest suspension in MLB history that wasn’t for life.
A laundry list of players received 50-plus game bans. And of course there’s Alex Rodriguez who could be out for a record 211 games if his appeal fails.
A-Rod is the only one who is fighting the suspension publically. Everyone else either went through a private appeal – which is what Melkie Cabrera did last year – or simply cut their losses and accepted the penalty.
Rodriguez represents the dying gasp of a disgraced era of bloated stats and rampant drug use. He and his kind will soon be weeded out from baseball because of these harsh suspensions and because players are finally getting tired of hearing about it.
Earlier this year, the players’ union announced anyone who had a credible case against them would not receive union help in the appeal. The players are fed up. They’re tired of having a good year called into question for the sins of past players.
Some of the fans are fed up too with people who feel they need to cheat to get ahead. Some, not all. There are those who feel the product on the field should be entertaining and if some want to use drugs to make the game more entertaining, then we should let them. A fair argument considering when Mark MacGuire, Sammy Sosa and Barry Bonds were sending balls into orbit, we lined up like lemmings to buy tickets to watch. We applauded the records just as hard as we now decry them.
Either way, baseball is putting its foot down and doing what it should have done from the very beginning. Selig doesn’t want his legacy tarnished by the steroid era, but no matter all the right steps he takes now, he can’t erase the stain the drug era caused with the 20-some-odd years of steroid use.
