I haven’t written much about baseball lately, partly because the Giants have been doing absolutely nothing, and partly because of the truly absurd spectacle that this scandal has become. Millions of dollars being spent investigating what consenting adults are using to improve themselves, dozens of big-time, superstar athletes finding their careers and reputations sullied for doing what anyone would do if they knew the truth; a truth that everyone is afraid to face the truth, because of a rampaging, moralistic, sensationalizing mass media machine.
It is enough to make me shut it all down, I’ll tell you that. Today’s NY Times has this piece of propaganda, in which we learn that, contrary to any evidence, or any common sense, or any history, or any facts, prohibition actually works!
Drug policy experts said the prosecutors of Operation Raw Deal could seek, at best, to disrupt the steady flow of performance-enhancing drugs.
“Use goes down when price goes up or availability is reduced,” said Jonathan P. Caulkins, a professor of public policy at Carnegie Mellon University. “We also know that ongoing enforcement pressure forces dealers to operate in inefficient ways, greatly increasing their costs of operation and, hence, increase the final retail price. So even if an operation doesn’t create a price spike, if it’s part of the background level of enforcement that forces the dealers to keep their heads down, then it may be doing some good.”
I guess it was a bad idea to end Prohibition after all. Oh, I’m sorry, these are experts. I didn’t realize they were experts. What were you saying? Use goes down if price goes up? Or does it go down if availability is reduced, which makes profits go away? Or are you saying that enforcement makes dealers use inefficient means to distribute their product, which would appear to mean having to use different cars to deliver trunks full of steroids? Are you kidding me? People who think like this need to be in the paper? Logic dies when men like this speak.
Meanwhile, we will soon learn that, because the Players Association failed to properly handle the anonymous testing samples properly, more players names will be dragged through the mud, for what purpose, exactly?
Who cares anymore? This is what happens when you let a used car salesman run a multi-billion dollar, multi-national corporation. You get this, a sloppy, ill-conceived, thoughtlessly disorganized disgrace. The minute Seligula decided to go forward with this “investigation,” we were headed here, to this slapstick comedy lacking style, grace or humor. You have one actor –the mainstream media– that has no legitimate connection with your industry, demanding reform, rehabilitation, and an almost constant stream of bad guys to vilify.
You have your heroes, led by people like Henry Waxman, who has apparently decided that his job is to head up the government’s interference into a completely legal, collectively bargained agreement between ownership and labor, something that would be unheard of in virtually any other industry. And in case you think I’m crazy, just imagine this kind of bullshit going on with, say, your local electrician’s union. You think people in construction don’t use PED’s? You think cops and firemen don’t? Truck drivers? Let me say it loud and clear; ONLY AN IDIOT WOULD THINK THAT.
Consequently, you find yourself throwing another iron in the fire for the prohibition crowd; who actually seem to believe that it is our nations best interest to spend millions and millions of dollars chasing people who use recreational and performance enhancing drugs while simultaneously ignoring the fact, THE FACT that the really dangerous drugs are legal and, more to the point, are actually promoted by the very industry that we now see being investigated.
This is happening, of course, at the same time we have a Super Bowl about to come down that features one of the best players on the best team having already tested positive –this season– for the same kind of drugs that are supposedly in need of being struck from the face of the earth –so that we can save the children– a situation that is so comically absurd as to seem farcical. It isn’t a farce, however. People’s lives are being destroyed, reputations tarnished, and millions of dollars being wasted to “clean up” a situation that isn’t in need of cleaning up.
I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again; find me the bodies. Get me the actual studies and reports and details that show that steroids kill, or cause cancer, or do whatever Dick Pound wants you to believe they do. You can’t. No one can. What you can find is one more industry built to stop people from doing something that should be their own business. One more industry desperately protecting us from ourselves, and being financed by companies that actually do make and sell drugs that are massively harmful to all of us, including the kids everyone wants to save.
You wanna tell me about drug-caused suicides, tell me about the suicides of the tens of thousands of teenagers who are binge-alcoholics. Tell me about the long-term suicides that we are watching whenever we see kids smoking Marlboros.
All of this falls in the commissioners lap. All of it. The sanctimonious sportswriters forgetting that they are not the show. The government interfering into private business. The investigations and scandals and all of it. If Selig was a man, a leader, he could have come out right from the start and said what is really true; that all he and the rest of the owners care about, all anyone in any multi-billion dollar a year industry care about is the bottom line. If players want to use PED’s to do their jobs, it’s their lives, their careers. They already take risks to be major-leaguers that most people would cringe at; why draw the line there.
Selig didn’t care about the health of the players, Steinbrenner didn’t care, Magowan didn’t, the Busch family didn’t, MIKE -FUCKING- LUPICA DIDN’T!!!
You wanna go after somebody? Go after the owners, go after the general managers. Every one of them should parade in front of Congress before Roger Clemens.
Love your subtlety,mia.
My point is that the most pathetic thing here is Selig and the owners aren’t even good at avarice! By trying to f*ck the players over, they’ve f*cked themselves over worse. No matter what one’s attitude is about steroids, you’re right – they screwed up, got lucky or looked the other way, and then screwed that up too.
I thought for a long time that Bonds was going to be the fall guy, and that was the owners’ plan… but it more and more looks like it’s not going to turn out that way.
There’s nothing more pathetic than a lousy crook. If Selig was in the mob, they’d be dragging the east river for him.
I find it hilarious that the US Government is trying to fight yet another war on drugs… will they never learn?
Selig’s stewardship is rivaled only by Warren G. Harding’s presidency. That he is being dictated to by the piggish-looking Congressional favor-peddling Henry Waxman is exactly the kind of unintended consequences that arise when personal integrity is set aside in favor of avarice without responsibility.
Don’t be surprised to see this downhill rolling shit ball gathering speed and end up in Magowan’s and Sabean’s lap. All of it. This entire mess could have been avoided if science, an honest search for truth, and the well-being of the sport as well as the business of baseball had been at the forefront. But no. What we got was owner sanctioned expediency and don’t ask, don’t tell PED policy, impatient greed, as a quick fix to declining attendance brought about by their own stupid handling of the 1994-95 lockout. Billionaires vs Millionaires.
And so the rodent-like billionaires, cowering in the glare of congressional and MSM torches, scurry into the shadows, ridiculing and blaming the workforce for their own slimy greedy purposes, as they flee the scene.
Couple of things.
Nobody every paid a nickel to watch an owner. Nobody every paid a nickel to watch some jackass in the MSM sit in an empty stadium. Of course if it wasn’t for Barry Bonds, fans would be flocking to watch MSM watching owners watching an empty stadium.
I don’t even follow baseball that much BUT NOW I HAVE TO. Congress? Are you kidding me? Gasbag convention supreme (is the camera on?).
BTW, someone (John?) must have made the argument that HGH should be considered a supplement. As you age, it depletes. Replenishing to “average levels” is supplementation, not steroid raging. Distinctions.
Please. I’ve supplemented my own hormone replacement regimen with supplements to help stimulate HGH growth. Why? First, the only real “source” of HGH is cadaver HGH which is extremely expensive. Second, it improves my quality of life. Bottom line, if I could afford it would I buy it. No shit Sherlock!
Excuse me for not doing my homework by reading every-freakin’-bodies 2 cents from “Around the Horn” (baaaad show) to ground my comments. There just comments and opinions and we all know about those and assholes.
btw….where is the outrage re the patriots breaking one of the most hallowed records in sports???
didnt they get caught receiving shipments of hgh???
and the double standard continues
has anyone seen rambo or rocky balboa???
both films are a commercial for the postive results to be gained from hgh
sly is friggin 61…and he looks better than most 40 year olds
im sorry, put me on hgh right now
“Go after the owners, go after the general managers”
Exactly.
I gotta tell you, making PEDs very costly may work in a way that it didn’t work for alcohol or for other strong illegal drugs. The reasons are the same as those that show they shouldn’t even be scheduled. They aren’t particular addictive and don’t give a high. People use them intermittently. If you’ve become addicted, you can get a prescription. And, if you’ve got the money, you can just go to a country without a super-idiotic press corps or grandstanding moron lawmakers.
Course alcohol is legal, with incredibly harmful side effects that can and several times daily does end in death for non-users and users alike, very addictive, not scheduled, and promoted by all sports.
“I gotta tell you, making PEDs very costly may work in a way that it didn’t work for alcohol or for other strong illegal drugs. The reasons are the same as those that show they shouldn’t even be scheduled. They aren’t particular addictive and don’t give a high. People use them intermittently. If you’ve become addicted, you can get a prescription. And, if you’ve got the money, you can just go to a country without a super-idiotic press corps or grandstanding moron lawmakers.”
Why would increasing cost matter when the reason why players take them is largely monetary gain? The difference in income between a player who is stuck in the minor leagues and a player who makes it into the big leagues is huge! The average salary in the MLB is several million dollars a year… SEVERAL MILLION, which is at least an order of magnitude more than minor league players make (barring signing bonuses). Unless the PED regimens cost upwards of 50k dollars, I don’t think we’ll see that big of a drop off, even among minor leaguers.
Besides, once in the major leagues, the difference between a 15HR season and a 40HR season (if PEDs can even do that), is probably on the order of 5-6M dollars per year, so even a regimen that costs 100s of thousands of dollars is unlikely to reduce demand greatly.
It’s all a matter of opportunity costs and motivation.
Exactly… it’s ludicrous to imagine that a MLB player wouldn’t be able to afford PEDs, and the reward (if there really is any) would dwarf the cost.
Bill James wrote a good essay called “The Death of Common Sense”, which I wish I could reproduce. In any case, part of it is that all of our society has become so mired in minutiea that the larger truths have gone by the wayside. Everything is technically illegal, and I believe that the media will latch onto ANYTHING that produces controversy. And that’s the yardstick, how much fuss gets stirred up.
The column make a good point, one I’ve slowly become less cynical about – Selig so massively blew it it’s incredible. If baseball was less than an enormous multi-billion dollar institution, he would have killed it by now. Throwing your productive labor to the wolves does no one any good in any business, and his (and the owners) petty attitude towards the players is very self-destructive. He should have, 5 years ago and continuing until now, stood up and said “fuck you, we have a labor agreement, we stand by our game, we’re working cooperatively with the union and it’s going great, steroids will be eradicated within a very few years, it’s none of your damn business” and said it again and again and again.
So much for “acting in the best interests of the game”.
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[...] John wrote a fantastic post today on “…. Logic dies”Here’s ONLY a quick extractI haven’t written much about baseball lately, partly because the Giants have been doing absolutely nothing, and partly because of the truly absurd spectacle that this scandal has become. Millions of dollars being spent investigating … [...]
[...] Frank Kanu wrote an interesting post today onHere’s a quick excerptThis is happening, of course, at the same time we have a Super Bowl about to come down that features one of the best players on the best team having already tested positive –this season– for the same kind of drugs that are supposedly in … Read the rest of this great post here [...]