There was poignancy in the timing of Marvin Miller's death, with the Major League Baseball Players Association holding its annual executive board meeting this week in Manhattan. Miller was the patriarch of the union, its first executive director and an extraordinary force who clearly deserves a place in the Hall of Fame. Few besides Babe Ruth and Jackie Robinson have had a greater impact on baseball.
But Miller, at the end, 30 years removed from his formal leadership role, was stubbornly unyielding on the consuming issue of the moment. He believed the union never should have agreed to testing for steroids, openly questioning whether such drugs affected performance at all.
"He'd voice those objections all the time," Michael Weiner, the current executive director, said Wednesday at a briefing for reporters. "Marvin was never hesitant to tell you what you were doing wrong. But to Marvin's credit, that didn't mean he wouldn't also tell you what you were doing right.
"Marvin's view of the last collective bargaining agreement was it was a great agreement and he thought we had done a great job. He still thinks we made a huge mistake with respect to drug testing, going back to the first agreement in 2003 that permitted drug testing. But Marvin was the kind of guy that could state his opinions but not have them unnecessarily color his view."
The union's past resistance to testing, the reluctance of the commissioner's office to push for it and the failure of the news media to press the issue conspired to taint a generation. The untangling of that history has just begun. The new Hall of Fame ballot is loaded with suspects, and the subject, like toxic waste, will linger for years.
Keeping the game clean remains a challenge. On Tuesday, Philadelphia Phillies catcher Carlos Ruiz became the eighth major leaguer in 2012 to be suspended for violating baseball's drug program.
Ruiz was suspended for 25 games for testing positive for an amphetamine, making him the second player, with Baltimore Orioles infielder Ryan Adams, to be suspended for stimulants. Six others have been suspended for 50 games for using performance-enhancing drugs, the most since 2007.
The last three — the former San Francisco Giants outfielder Melky Cabrera, Oakland Athletics pitcher Bartolo Colon and San Diego Padres catcher Yasmani Grandal — tested positive for an elevated level of testosterone. So did the Milwaukee Brewers' Ryan Braun, in October 2011, before his suspension was overturned last spring. Weiner said the union recognizes the trend.
"Testosterone appears to be a problem, the use of testosterone by some players, and there are things that we have talked about with the people that we involve in our program to make sure that our deterrent on testosterone is as strong as it can be," Weiner said.
"Frankly, a lot of things in this area are two-edged swords," he added. "We have more testosterone positives than in the past. Without getting into specifics that I shouldn't share, some of the detection of testosterone positives that we had, I don't think could have been done by any other program. In other words, the fact that we detected those shows that we do have strong deterrents in our program.
"I understand the fact that we've had a number of them suggests that people thought they could use. But we caught some people that I'm not sure any other drug program could have caught, in light of the sophistication of our testing, and we're going to make it more sophisticated. We really believe the best way to deter conduct is to make it more likely players will get caught. That's more important than focusing on the severity of the penalty, which is pretty severe as well."
Some players favor stricter penalties than are mandated in the current system, which starts with 50 games for the first positive test, 100 for the second and a lifetime ban for the third. On closer consideration, Weiner said, they usually reconsider.
Anda sedang membaca artikel tentang
On Baseball: On Drug Tests, Marvin Miller Wound Up at Odds With the Union
Dengan url
http://suporterfanatikos.blogspot.com/2012/11/on-baseball-on-drug-tests-marvin-miller.html
Anda boleh menyebar luaskannya atau mengcopy paste-nya
On Baseball: On Drug Tests, Marvin Miller Wound Up at Odds With the Union
namun jangan lupa untuk meletakkan link
On Baseball: On Drug Tests, Marvin Miller Wound Up at Odds With the Union
sebagai sumbernya
0 komentar:
Posting Komentar