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Thursday, Nov 26, 2009
Baseball owners and players negotiate: 3 steroid strikes and yer ... out? Maybe? Plus: LSU lets down Katrina victims. And: Tear down Fenway!
Sep 27, 2005 | The baseball owners and players are negotiating a new steroids-testing agreement with stiffer penalties and tests for amphetamines.
One thing they can't seem to agree on is whether you should be "out" with three strikes. The owners say yes. The players have strong feelings about their answer: maybe.
Commissioner Bud Selig, who is scheduled to appear before a congressional committee again Wednesday along with union chief Don Fehr and their counterparts from the NBA, NFL and NHL, wants a 50-game suspension for the first offense, 100 games for the second and a lifetime ban for the third.
Fehr wants 20, 75 and a possible lifetime ban. What he also wants is some flexibility in the process.
The union's latest proposal calls for positive-test cases to be subject to review by an arbitrator, who would be able to increase the penalty for a first offense from 20 games to as many as 30 if there are aggravating factors, or reduce it to as few as 10 if there are mitigating factors.
A similar review would take place for subsequent violations, meaning a player might avoid a lifetime ban for a third positive.
That would be good news for people like Seattle Mariners rookie Michael Morse, who earlier this month got a 10-day suspension for a first offense under the major league program. But Morse also tested positive twice in the minor leagues. Morse says his second and third positive tests were both the result of 2003 steroid use that remains detectable, a claim that has gone undisputed.
Major League Baseball executive vice president Rob Manfred said in a statement defending Morse's suspension that players negotiated the right to come to the big leagues with a clean slate, drug test-wise, and that can work for or against them.
Just as two positive tests in the minors don't mean Morse is punished as a three-time loser after his first major league positive, Manfred wrote, he is not "immunized" from big-league punishment for a violation that was also punished in the minors.
That's fine as far as it goes, but what if Morse had been in the majors in 2003 -- when he admits he made an "enormous mistake" by taking steroids -- and what if MLB had had a testing program in place then? Morse would now be banned for life for a single offense, the evidence of which lingered long enough to be noticed by three different tests. That wouldn't even seem fair to Draco.
"We always thought there was a need for a review," Fehr told the Associated Press. "You don't have a cookie-cutter approach. The better approach if you can is to gauge the individual facts and circumstances."
