March 20, 2005

Steroid Use by Players Threaten Baseball Monopoly

As one who started his journalism career writing about sports in the Flint (Mich.) Daily Journal, I beg indulgence for a jeremiad about the declining mores of major league baseball.

Ugh!

Trigger for this outburst is the congressional hearings on the use of steroids by baseball players.

However, the whole baseball “system” depicts the evils of monopoly – that anything goes for fame and fortune.

On the hot seat are Jose Canseco, Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa. Two other players ordered to testify are Rafael Palmeiro and Frank Thomas who stoutly deny using “performance enhancing drugs.”

Listening carefully are Bud Selig, commissioner of professional baseball; Donald Fehr, executive director of the players union; and Peter Angelos, owner of the Baltimore Orioles.

Canseco -- a Cuban sand-lotter who made it big in the American League – unleashed a tempest with his book “Juiced: Wild Times, Rampant Roids, Smash Hits and How Baseball Got Big.”

He left out kitchen sinks, but we can expect further enlightenment in a sequel. Canseco’s book indicts everyone in Major League baseball except the bat boy. In his opening statement to the House Committee on Government Reform, Canseco said:

“I had hoped that what I experienced first hand, when revealed, would give insight into a darker side of a game that I loved. That, maybe, it would force baseball to acknowledge it condoned this activity for the sole purpose of increasing revenue at the gate.

“All of these attacks [against me] have been spurred on by an organization that holds itself above the law. An organization that chose to exploit its players for the increased revenue that lines its pockets and then sacrifice those same players to protect the web of secrecy that was hidden for so many years.”

Canseco’s book is a mixture of braggadocio for spreading “safe” steroid use in the major leagues, and complaint that he now is criticized for doing what the big money makers wanted.

While we wait for something constructive to materialize in the congressional committee, it is instructive to examine intricacies of the deal for a major league baseball team for Washington, D.C.

The team that 43 years ago was “First in the hearts of fans, but last in the American League” has returned to the Nation’s Capital. Area aficionados have bought out the opening game April 5. District councilors had no trouble raising cash for a new stadium two or three years hence.

Where else but in the United States can we find citizens and a government anxious to build facilities for private corporations and their employees to make huge profits and salaries?

Be it remembered that baseball commissioner Selig brokered the deal that handed over the Washington franchise. This, after calming nearby Baltimore Orioles owner Peter Angelos. He was stroked with the largest part of future television income by the Washington Nationals.

This year’s prize for chutzpah surely goes to Angelos. He bought a full-page ad in the Washington Post asserting the Major Baseball League effectively granted him:

“Exclusive rights to a geographically defined television territory stretching from Pennsylvania through all Maryland, the District of Columbia, Virginia, Delaware, portions of West Virginia and as far south as Charlotte, North Carolina.”

In other words, the Nationals can have their box office receipts. However, the lucrative television rights to Nationals’ games will go to Angelos who might, or might not, kick back a “fee” to the Nationals.

Back in the good old days when baseball income depended on box office revenue – and such markets were few – a case could be made for a limited number of clubs plus de facto slavery for players.

Television spread audiences around the country like mayonnaise on a ham sandwich. How long will it be before baseball is outsourced to Japan?

The scandal now leaking into public consciousness is what happens when the nation’s hard-won anti-monopoly laws are winked at. When manufacturing corporations dance around monopoly laws, jail happens. Professional football stopped drug use by its athletes through strict banishment rules -- well, somewhat.

Professional baseball had better shape up, or it could lose monopoly privileges -- next to the right to print money.

What government gives, government can take away.

Lindsey Williams is a Sun columnist who can be contacted at LinWms@earthlink.com