WHAT’S AILING THE SPORTS WORLD?

Two things are taking over the sports world, and one seems to rely on the other.

First is the sad commentary on sports that we now need mandatory spot drug testing! The prevalence of drugs in the sports world is so bad that not only must we test; we must test so that no one can prepare for the testing. What that means is drugs won’t go away, and athletes will do anything to have the drugs in their system. They either enjoy the high or it enables them to exceed their normal abilities.

We have gone through enough of the problem to know that BALCO is probably just the tip of an iceberg that promises to grow even larger. The shame of Barry Bonds not paying a stiffer penalty is a comment on society that we will have more tolerance for drugs, not less. Zero tolerance in the sports world, through the courts is a myth. The judge that sentenced Bonds proved that. U. S. District Court Judge Susan Illston gave Bonds no jail time for his steroid use, and really just a slap on his wrist. The problem has pervaded the trainer’s room, the doctor’s office and the locker room, all places to secure drugs and for a price, not the streets anymore.

The drug world has taken the sport of baseball and destroyed any chance of having meaningful comparisons. Mark McGwire, Sammy Sosa, and Barry Bonds have taken care of that with their drugged, steroid fed homerun totals. We have to go ahead and view these totals with a sense of skepticism and some doubt that they are meaningful. We look to the home run as a category of achievement, but what about triples, doubles and singles? How many records per team are tainted?

Was Roger Clemens on something the night he threw Piazza’s broken bat at him? How much of his stats are worthless? Where is the integrity of the game so many of us thought is present in the game? How many people are being gypped by paying outrageous money to see a bunch of druggies play? Are they getting what they really paid for?

That brings me to the second thing wrong with sports. Money.

Would the drugs be there: if the players weren’t getting so much money to begin with? Are these salaries the reason sports in general are dying for lack of integrity? Is there a limitation to what we should be paying to watch a game, and paying a bunch of druggies?

The MLBPA is opposed to random steroid testing, claiming it to be an invasion of the privacy of players. But after enormous negative publicity surrounding the (BALCO) steroid scandal, the players were forced to drop their opposition to a steroid testing program. The US Congress got involved and threatened to pass a law if the MLB's drug policy was not strengthened, and the baseball union agreed in 2005 to a policy that would include 50-game, 100-game, and lifetime suspensions.”

It is about this time in 1966 when Marvin Miller put together for MLBPA the demands for salary increases, and soon came the revenue sharing demands; the players suddenly had a lot of money to spend. They were making the kind of money that made it affordable to purchase drugs, find doctors and suppliers and keep it going.

If you look at the costs of today’s franchises, long term deals, money that gets wasted because the player’s ability is less than the deal he signed, a guaranteed deal, you wonder why you can’t take your kid to a ballgame?

Look in the stands today, and you see corporate ownership in most of the box seats, stadiums named after corporations, and the unions driving the costs of player’s salaries ever higher than before. How is it possible to have ownership of a team when you have revenue sharing and obscene salaries? The corporations are the only reason that keeps the franchise alive, along with TV money.

But who pays for all this in the end? You and me.