Murray Chass has a piece in today’s NY Times about a potential baseball World Cup Tournament. He suggests that this type of competition would be better than the Olympics experiment, (which won’t include the USA in the upcoming Olympics because we failed to qualify), primarily because the Olympic schedule conflicts with the MLB schedule. He also addresses what appears to be the biggest hurdle, drug-testing. Here’s a taste:
“Drug testing, as dictated by the sanctimonious satraps of the sports and drug worlds, is not the ultimate element that rules athletes. Just because it’s done for the Olympics doesn’t mean it has to be done for everything and everyone else. As the players union points out, its members have rights, too. If they want to negotiate away their rights, that’s their right. They did that to some extent in the 2002 labor negotiations with management. The self-appointed, self-important observers who have criticized the baseball drug-testing agreement have a right to their opinion, but that’s all it is, an opinion. They cannot dictate to baseball or its players the kind of drug testing they should employ.”
Wow. That’s a fairly controversial statement, wouldn’t you say? I mean, it’s one thing for me to say something like that, but for Chass, in the NY Times? Yummy. Good for Chass. Good for the Times.
