Chad's spot for various thoughts, musings, poetry, ideas and whatnot

Friday, December 14, 2007

The Mitchell Report is out. I was amazed during the run up to it's release that most of the major media outlets were poo-pooing the report saying that it wouldn't name any real names, that it would amount to a slap on the wrist, that it wouldn't make any real recommendations, etc., etc., etc.

Well.

It looks like the former senator, with a little help from federal prosecutors and good fortune, wrecked the image of baseball in a way that is so definitive that even the "bury-my-head-in-the-sand" deniers have had to take notice. He laid the blame on everyone and was specific about it; players, clubhouse personnel, management, the players union, you name it. He exposed the culture of doping and cheating. He made tough recommendations that really sounded good coming from a guy who is known to love the game as to how to clean the sport up.

I have to wonder though if he didn't learn just a little bit from how badly cycling has handled it's doping problem. Would the report have been as strong in terms of laying out blame and recommending recourse had we not had to watch cycling try to slowly kill itself over the last 20 years? If you look at it, the problems are basically the same with the exception of EPO. There's an organized sort of underground network of distributors and enablers (Belgian mafia anyone???). The athletes are all vigorously denying involvement by saying they've never tested positive. The owners/sponsors are acting like victims when it's known that they supplied both the pressure to perform and the financial resources to obtain the products. Even the fans share some blame by expecting virtuosio performances and near athletic invincibility on a regular basis.

Baseball is corrupt. Just like cycling is. Just like American football and European futbol (the latest cycling scandal also found evidence on over 100 soccer players in Europe but that information has been repressed for the sake of national interest...their time is coming). Big money sports whether it be the fake amateur levels like college football and the Olympics or the professional leagues like the NFL, the NBA and MLB on this side of the pond and World Cup soccer and basketball as well as international cycling are rotten to the very core.

In my mind, however, only cycling is trying to find a way out of the morass. Of all the big money sports, only cycling has unannounced blood testing and mandatory two-year suspensions. Donald Fehr in his press conference yesterday basically said that the MLB Players Union would fight any attempt at blood testing. His COO routinely let players know when they were going to be tested. The NFL bans players for only a month for a performance enhancing substance positive test and the team forfeits nothing. Some teams in cycling have been so visionary as to see that even this sort of program will not stop the cheaters and the pressures to cheat. Slipstream, CSC and High Road (formerly T-Mobile) have all gone to a stronger system designed to catch abnormalities in blood and urine markers over the course of the entire year with regular testing. This serves to insulate the riders from pressure and lab error. The Grand Tours are going to require "blood passports" of all riders. No one, and I mean no one, is doing as much as cycling is to deal with doping. I don't know if it will work but I do think that several teams are on the right track.

Now if the other leagues will follow suit with allowing blood testing by outside independent agencies, requiring long-term blood marker tracking and having harsh penalties for cheaters and the teams that enable them then maybe we'll get somewhere.

For now, I hope that baseball gets the crap knocked out of it in the court of public opinion. That's the only thing that'll get the culture to change. It's the only thing that is forcing cycling out of the darkness. However, if baseball is going to be following cycling's lead, it'll take another huge scandal about ten years from now and the loss of some major network broadcasting contracts (leaving MLB on VS maybe???) to really force some change.

Thanks for Reading.

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