December 16, 2007
Players Testing Players
J.C. Brabury thinks out of the box and comes up with a good drug testing program.
Enforcement should be carried out by the baseball players' union instead of by the owners. Some will fear that the players would turn clubhouses into steroid dens if they were allowed to regulate the standards and the punishments for taking performance-enhancing drugs. But the incentives suggest otherwise. The party with the strongest incentives to enforce a testing program is the players. They are the ones who suffer from drug use by their peers, and they are in the best position to monitor each other and respond quickly to the countermeasures that cheaters employ.
Drug testing is in place because the clean players wanted it, and some cheating players wanted the need to cheat removed. Bradbury suggests high fines that get distributed to players who pass tests. It's an idea worth exploring.
Posted by David Pinto at
01:22 PM
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Cheating
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A system that depends on players ratting out their peers has absolutely no - zero - chance of success. No active player has ever squealed on another and there have been millions of dollars in salaries on the line. Bradbury needs to take off the rose glasses.
Any program that also needs owners to turn in their own players will fail. No mangement official will turn in a player who is producing for them - find me an example of a GM using the reasonable doubt clause in the CBA to test a player.
Players would do far better than management if a choice had to be amde in this regard.
Read Lords of the realm where Ray Kroc, upon being told a player who hit a game winning double was on cocaine said "dammit, then give em all cocaine".
Love it
Move it further from the notion of "The Man"
Financial security? Are you kidding? What part of the millions of dollars a year that Clemens, Bonds, Tejada, Giambi, etc. got is for financial security? It's financial indulgence, plain and simple. I am very secure in my finances at a fraction of the salary
Players won't "squeal" on each other. That's why baseball is in the mess it's in. I fully believe that Canseco, Bonds, McGwire, Clemens, etc., had teammates who knew they did steroids, and they did nothing and said nothing. This is completely subjective, but the incentives not to squeal seem to be far greater than the incentive to squeal.
