Fixing baseball

Congress is inserting itself into controversy over performance-enhancing drugs in baseball, once America’s pastime and still a sport engrained in our culture and history. This is appropriate.

Baseball authorities have shown themselves unable or unwilling to rid the major leagues of drugs. Perhaps this would be none of the federal government’s business if baseball at the highest level could be dismissed as no more than a harmless game.

But it cannot. Major League Baseball (MLB) is a massive business disproportionately influential on the young. The use of steroids and human growth hormone has cast a shadow over several careers; people routinely say asterisks are needed next to several recent records.

Arguably this defrauds the fans who watch baseball and pay the sport, its owners, players, advertisers and others, billions of dollars each season. Athletes, idolized by young fans, set a bad and dangerous example about which it is proper for Washington to be concerned.

In January, at least two House panels will hold hearings, and Rep. Bobby Rush (D-Ill.) has said he will introduce legislation modeled after recommendations included in the report released last week by former Senate Majority Leader George Mitchell (D-Maine).

Mitchell’s recommendation that MLB’s drug testing system be run by an outside agency would provide fans with more confidence that players who are breaking the rules and sometimes the law with drugs are being policed.

Baseball’s testing system has captured a few fish, but is woefully inaccurate. After Mitchell’s report was released, MLB Commissioner Bud Selig acknowledged that teams and players were warned 24 hours in advance of what were supposed to be random tests. Given the ease with which positive tests can be covered up, the warnings were inexcusable. Selig has said they will be dropped.

The U.S. Anti-Doping Agency (USADA) would be the natural outside group to police the sport, but it seems doubtful MLB on its own would agree to hire the group, which has aggressively gone after Olympic athletes for cheating. Dick Pound, chairman of the World Anti-Doping Agency, told The Canadian Press he’d be shocked if baseball hired USADA or any similar organization, predicting team owners and the union representing players would not want to submit to tough outside scrutiny.

That’s where Congress could play a key role — threatening to mandate external scrutiny if the MLB does not take effective voluntarily steps. Through hearings and legislation, Congress can pressure baseball. By airing the dirty laundry and asking tough questions, Congress can encourage reform. Baseball has to pay attention to Congress because it has the authority to revoke MLB’s highly coveted antitrust exemption.

Records matter more in baseball than in any other sport. The most stunning news in Mitchell’s report was the charge that pitcher Roger Clemens, famed for legendary workouts that kept him at the top of the baseball pyramid into his 40s, used steroids.

His accomplishments outshone and overshadowed those of Greg Maddux, who has won 347 games in a remarkable 22-year career that one day will put him in the Hall of Fame. Maddux is not in the report and there have never been whispers linking him to performance-enhancing drugs. Yet he is not as celebrated as Clemens, a high-profile star whose fame has won him endorsements and national commercials.

Baseball owes its fans and most talented players a drug testing system that tries to stop the cheating. Cheating fixes results. And if results are fixed, it’s no longer sport.