February 26, 2009
Going to Helling
Via The Big Lead, Time Magazine talks to Rick Helling, who warned the MLBPA about steroid use back in 1998:
That same winter, with the party raging at full throttle, one man rose up and basically announced the whole damn thing was a fraud. Rick Helling, a 27-year-old righthanded pitcher and the players' representative for the Texas Rangers, stood up at the winter meeting of the Executive Board of the Major League Baseball Players Association and made an announcement. He told his fellow union leaders that steroid use by ballplayers had grown rampant and was corrupting the game.
"There is this problem with steroids," Helling told them. "It's happening. It's real. And it's so prevalent that guys who aren't doing it are feeling pressure to do it because they're falling behind. It's not a level playing field. We've got to figure out a way to address it.
"It's a bigger deal than people think. It's noticeable enough that it's creating an uneven playing field. What really bothers me is that it's gotten so out of hand that guys are feeling pressure to do it. It's one thing to be a cheater, to be somebody who doesn't care whether it's right or wrong. But it's another thing when other guys feel like they have to do it just to keep up. And that's what's happening. And I don't feel like this is the right way to go."
At that point, the union could have cleaned this up on their own. They could have instituted testing, kept it quiet, pushed doping out of the sport. They chose to ignore the problem, as they were making too much money at the time.
Posted by David Pinto at
01:03 PM
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True enough, the union choose to 'ignore' the problem (or more accurately, they, along with MLB owners, chose not to make a public issue of it) but I'm not sure that if everyone (union and owners alike) were making less money, the results would have been all that different. It's tempting to cast this as a "we're too rich to care" drama, and to some extents that may be true. But we can't ever forget the 400 pound gorilla in the room when talking about ANY action (joint or otherwise) regarding matters affecting players, rules, business practice, etc. ..and that is the CBA. Neither party has the right to just "do something" relating to anything relating to the game...especially something as material as whether to submit players to testing (blood, urine or otherwise). Any act must either be negotiated or not done at all. My guess is that somewhere along the lines, someone attempted to raise this and require more stringent testing/penalties long before 2002 or even 1998....But there was no way that the Union would ever agree to that.
I don't think the CBA prohitbited the players from testing themselves. It kept the owners from testing them, but if the players wanted to do internal testing, I don't see how the owners could stop them. Then again, I'm not a lawyer.
Dave - of course those internal tests would remain private. Once the press ogt wind of it they would bury any and all players.
It was better to do it as part of the 2002 CBA - and also better to let the same whiny sportswriters of today publish their poetic feel good Sosa/McGwire tomes and cash in before they had to do some actual reporting work.
