Baseball, steroids and kids

What should be done about a player’s in-your-face violation of the law banning steroid use in sports?

Fact: Possessing anabolic steroids without a valid prescription is illegal. Most kids, parents, policymakers and common citizens know using dangerous drugs is wrong, not least a drug that produces everything from liver failure to violent paranoia. So why do we tolerate it?

Fact: The penalty for using steroids can be a year in prison and a minimum $1,000 fine for the first offense.

Last fact: Distributing steroids carries a maximum penalty of five years in prison and $250,000 for the first felony offense. So, why are there no prosecuted athletes?

Enter the world of baseball. Here, we admire home-run sluggers charging a holy grail of unbroken records and Hall of Fame status. Then we find players openly challenging the right of Congress to investigate steroid use in professional sports, boldly denying the incontrovertible truth of documents seized from steroid dealers, denying knowledge of what they were seen doing, denying distribution to other players, appearing before grand juries with “dog-ate-my-homework, don’t-know-what-that-was” excuses.

Never mind if we feel like cheering their hits. Why are they not arrested, prosecuted, convicted and sentenced — in short, treated like everyone else? What gives? Are we afraid to call things by their right name? Are we worried about popular discontent in the stands?

Add salt to that public wound. They now mock prosecutors and Congress, suggesting other issues are “more important,” thumbing their noses at our legal system and oversight. They saunter away, above it all — above the law, so it seems.

We common ticket-buyers, you know dumb parents with giddy kids, are just so much furniture in their well-adorned lives. Drugs that helped them advance are OK.

Sheesh. Where do you begin? Let’s just try. … Why should this stuff be investigated, prosecuted and why does it matter?

(1) Those are the rules. We live in a nation of laws, not lawless sluggers.

(2) Admirable historical figures are not cheats.

(3) Baseball’s antitrust exemption is not a personal exemption from criminal liability for fast-track baseball players.

(4) More kids are beginning to use steroids — guess why?

(5) There is an old thing called honor. It goes with other values, coincidentally at America’s heart. You know, like honesty, hard work, respect for those who climbed unaided, old-fashioned stuff, integrity, dusty pants, aches, pains, real life.

Look at these steroid-pumpers from another angle. What would Lou Gehrig say to — you name the player? What would Gehrig have done if offered a shortcut to fame? I can tell you — he would have looked that offer in the eye long and hard, shamed it into dropping its eyes, and done what he always did: go back to work. Self-respect meant more to him than a trample-thy-neighbor dash for misplaced adulation.

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