Why is no one mentioning his name???
There’s been much debate and controversy surrounding the Bonds home run chase and the topics are many. Should Bonds’ record stand? Should it have an asterisk? Is Barry most to blame for this? Is Bud Selig at fault for allowing the “steroid era” to taint the record books? I have a few thoughts and ideas on the subject.
Bonds-like most others outside of (phone company name here) Park, I disdain him for using the performance enhancing drugs and for the extraordinary lengths he’s gone to defend himself against the allegations brought forth. Having your longtime friend and personal trainer go to the slammer to cover for you isn’t cool in my book, quite frankly. But by the same token he is a player, and despite using such substances certainly was not the only player to try to improve his game through such methods. Caminiti, McGwire, Sosa, Palmeiro…..the list goes on.
Selig?- To be sure, he had his head in the sand on all of the rumors going around about PED abuse. But he took his head out of the sand at some point in the 90’s and set to work on getting something…..anything done to help in cleaning up the game. And frankly that leads me to the biggest culprit in this whole mess, someone who’s not getting nearly as much grief as he should be.
You see, in order for Selig to get an MLB steroid policy in place, he had to go through the Players Union.
In order for Selig to make a policy with testing, he had to go through the Players Union.
In order for Selig to form a policy that hands out any kind of punishment, he had to get the agreement of the Players Union.
And that’s why the biggest culprit in all this is one Donald Fehr. For years prior to the time of the first MLB steroid policy(2002) Selig was banging the drum for comprehensive steroid testing with suspensions for violators. Fehr’s response was normally a very PC way of saying “F*** you Bud, steroids are a privacy issue and any policy will HAVE to be negotiated in the next CBA!” and battled the very notion of any of this for years up to and including saying such to the pols on Capitol Hill. Even when one was finally put in place in ‘02 under the new CBA it was still nothing more than some testing to see if there is enough of a percentage of positive tests to continue the policy.
The nonsense continued when the policy began to include some suspensions for multiple offenders in ‘04 and Fehr would have likely kept it at that had it not been for the debacle of Sosa(no habla ingles), McGwire(I’m not here to talk about the past) and Palmeiro(I have NEVER used steroids) testifying on Capitol Hill in ‘05.
Only then did Fehr finally cave in to the notion of common sense, the same path that the NFL had gone down decades earlier with steroids and punishments were intensified to their current levels. It’s something that should have been in place at least a decade prior.
There’s no telling as to how much different things would be had Fehr taken the path of the NFL and treated steroids as a health issue for the protection of the players instead of a privacy issue. Would Ken Caminiti still be with us?
Bud may be part of the mess that is the steroid era, but the Donald failed at many turns to protect his membership and in part the game by doing everything in his power to see to it that performance enhancing drugs and henceforth, the steroid era remained a part of baseball.
And that above all should be his legacy.
