Drew Fairservice rounds up the reactions to the PED allegations against Alex Rodriguez. I tend to agree with Matthew Pouilet on why A-Rod cheated, that it comes from the ultra competitiveness of professional athletes. Drew goes on to make a very good point:
The league suits can legislate and work to clean up the game, to ensure the fans are getting a fair show for their money and the participants are safe from themselves. But cheating is not unique to baseball and it isn’t going to ceremoniously go away under threat of suspension.
The issue is complex, more complex than most fans want to acknowledge. Displaying the heads of confirmed drug users on pikes outside each Major League baseball stadium makes a good show but it won’t stop those determined to get inside by from trying — any means necessary. All we can hope for a concerted effort to ensure those who wish to undermine the integrity of the game are refused entry and thrown out on their ears when found guilty.
FOUND guilty, not assumed guilty. That distinction means everything.
… it’s not long before a rich ballplayer can afford to have his own private biotech lab in his basement, making performance enhancing drugs tailor-made for him. They won’t be detected, because he’ll be the only user.
The players aren’t making their own yet, but enhancing science has stayed ahead of the testers.
Kind of like a race car having a team of engineers, mechanics, etc, working to make their car the winner. I can see that happening. There’s enough money to go around.
If a player gets a 100 million dollar contract, i can easily see 30 million going to the “team” that helped enhance his performance.
More and more this is looking like Brave New World territory. But is that a bad thing, a great athlete has a genetic disposition that most folks don’t have.
What’s so wrong about using science and the player’s natural talents to make the person even better? I struggle with understanding the moral consequences that are at play here. If the idea is to be the best, then throughout our evolution we’ve made huge advances in medical science. Isn’t the idea to use these things to our benefit?
If we aren’t killing people in the process, then what’s so wrong? If we can actually prove that people using these drugs can have a positive affect on their abilities to perform, and their life isn’t being cut short then I am confused why it’s so wrong.
Stretching the limits of what a human being can do is what makes us different than other mammals, as well as animals. I would dare to say: it’s actually what we are supposed to do.
How do you know the players aren’t making their own yet?
JJ » The richest ones, Manny, A-Rod, seem to be getting caught buying from others. That, I would think, is evidence that they are not making their own yet.
Dimelo » It’s a tough question. Would you trade five years of your life for millions of dollars? If it meant securing a future free of want for my family, I might make that exchange. There are people who work in dangerous profession for the reward of higher pay.
On the other hand, there’s a good reason to not want to take drugs for non-medical reasons. They almost all have side effects.
The side effects and health concerns are probably why some players may use steroids on a sporadic basis, like in contract years, where the usage is more likely to have a bigger payoff. Beware the contract year.
Many of the Latin players get their drugs south of the border during the offseason where they train. I have to imagine they are out of reach of the testers in the DR.
3 of those on the list got busted. They all played for WC teams. The east coast users, had no problem, and most positive tests seem to come from outside the North/Middle East which is the biggest market. Makes you wonder if something is up with collections there. Are players/teams being tipped off.?
For some reason I imagined Arod getting his stuff from someplace more credible. Those notebooks are the only evidence. His name is a common one in the Miami area and it appearing in a few notebooks is hardly conclusive. It is very strange the company stops operating for a month and the owner disappears yet leaves these sensitive notebooks in the office. The notebooks could have been used to show prospective clients to make the company seem more credible, and the Arods name could have been just added for that purpose.
As for the rich players being caught, well, Manny did. Arod has not yet been caught by his testers. How often does a player who is a star in his cost controlled years and not an impending free agent get caught?.
I’ve become cynical enough to believe that performance enhancement has become the norm in professional sports. It may get to the point where a player simply doesn’t get to the MLB or NLF unless he uses PEDs, unless he has a really unusual and specific skill.
The probable solution is to openly allow and monitor all but a handful of really dangerous drugs, but I don’t see how a Commissioner gets to there in the current political environment.
The saying about the only way three people being able to keep a secret is for two of them to be dead comes to mind. Hiring a staff of high level biochemists and paying them large sums of money leaves trails in the modern world, in some ways more obvious trails than obtaining PEDs through more mundane sources. I could see some player who was already a superstar going off and living on a private island every winter and keeping all the high tech stuff there, but living like a supervillain is going to focus attention on him–people will assume he’s cheating even if he actually is just a Michael Jackson-esque nutcase who is actually totally PED-free.
M. Scott Eiland » The point is you don’t need a staff of biochemists, you just need one.
Perhaps I’m leaning to close to the conspiracy theory here, but it appears to me that a name written in a notebook is not is not conclusive proof that someone has done something (See: Law and Order, SVU).
Isn’t there a chance that the name A-Rod was a code for another athlete who they were giving drugs to?
Give me a break, Alex. A-Rod is a cheater. Plain and simple. He cheated before and made up a bogus story about when he stopped that a select number of the media seemed to buy into.
His body has been deteriorating rapidly as a result in these last few years.
He has shown consistently the lack of class and decency (the “MINE!” incident, the slapping the glove incident), and his continued disrespect for the game by his continued cheating.
Plus his constant lying to the fans about it. I hope he doesn’t retire, so the Yankees are on the hook for the balance of that ridiculous contract.
Alex Hayes » Of course it’s not proof. The history of these accusations, however, shows us that they usually are true. In Bayesian terms, the prior is quite high here.
Hands up if you’ve ever heard of the “New Miami Times” before.
I think I’m going to scribble some stuff about having an affair with Michelle Obama and mail it to Drudge.
I’m not saying they’re full of it, but this doesn’t strike me as a high quality report. When Fainru-Wanda & Williams broke the Balco, I recall a deeper body of evidence than I see here.
Zep: That’s exactly what I’m talking about. Rightly (or perhaps wrongly) Arod has a terrible public image, and has made numerous decisions that appear to show disrespect for the game, or are definitely further towards unfair play rather than gamesmanship. And as a Red Sox fan, I would much rather the Yankees spend all that money the next few years. However, ‘not being a nice guy’ is not evidence that supports his name being in that book as definitively proving they were providing him with steroids.
David: Roger Clemens would claim that the history of these allegations show they are not true at all.