Tuesday, August 27, 2002
No muscle in baseball's steroid-testing plan
By STEVE WILSTEIN
AP Sports Writer
NEW YORK — Along with copies of the drug-testing plan that's being worked out, baseball should send players samples of anabolic steroids, human growth hormone, andro and other testosterone-boosting supplements.
They'll be free to use them, anyway.
They'll be able to juice up on illegal steroids all they want during the winter, building strength for the season ahead. They'll just have to taper off, maybe take some masking agents, to slip through a urine test in spring training or later in the season, whenever it's most convenient.
Even if one or two players per team flunk the test, that's OK.
Under the union's initial proposal, 60 players in the majors — 5 percent of all 1,200 players on the 40-man rosters — could bust the seams of their jerseys with steroid-inflated muscles. That would still be considered “insignificant use” under this sham of a plan.
During the season, the candy store of supplements would be wide open with no testing for anything but the most powerful, “schedule 3” steroids. Clubhouses might as well stock androstenedione — Mark McGwire's over-the-counter supplement of choice — and the increasingly popular nandrolone, along with their free supplies of bubble gum, chewing tobacco and sunflower seeds.
Baseball may think it's satisfying Congress and fooling the public with its drug-testing plan, but it's probably doing neither. More than likely it will result in greater drug use, not less, as players figure out how and when they can take steroids and beat the tests.
It will do nothing to reduce the perception, suggested by several players, that steroid use is rampant. Worst of all, it sends the message to young fans and prospects that the national pastime has a high tolerance for steroids.
A few minor details, such as disciplinary penalties, still have to be resolved. But the broad outline leaves observers who are intimately involved in drug-testing aghast at the flaws in baseball's plan, which doesn't even approach the strict testing in the Olympics, NCAA, NFL and other major sports.
Without random, unannounced, year-round testing run by an independent agency that can impose sanctions, the plan is “nothing more than public relations,” says Frank Shorter, the former marathoner who serves as chairman of the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency.
Richard Pound, chairman of the World Anti-Doping Agency that oversees Olympic testing, says baseball's proposal “has none of the hallmarks of a serious plan. ... It's almost as if it's a denial that there is a problem.”
Dr. Gary Wadler, a steroid expert at the NYU School of Medicine and a member of WADA's medical research committee, says baseball's plan has three strikes against it from the start.
“To suggest that 60 players on anabolic steroids is not a problem is, in my mind, a big problem,” Wadler says. “Secondly, you have to do it year-round because the way steroids are used is to bulk up prior to competition, then stop the steroids going into the season and get all the benefits. So even if they test four times a season, you still can stop a week before spring training and ride that wave for a long time.
“Strike three is that they're only going to test for class 3 steroids, so you're begging the whole andro issue, as well as other performance-enhancing drugs.”
Baseball's biggest mistake may be in trying to tackle drug-testing on its own, rather than contracting it out to an independent group like WADA. But that assumes baseball really wants to do something about drugs, rather than simply try to make the issue go away for a while.
Instead of mounting an earnest attack on drug use, the union called for a wimpy two-stage process. Beginning next spring, all players would be tested at least once to determine the general level of steroid use. If fewer than 5 percent test positive, the survey would be repeated in 2004. If more than 5 percent test positive either time, random, unannounced testing would be instituted for two years, though not in the offseason.
“The right of an individual to go into your home on Christmas Eve and say, 'Guess what? It's time to give urine' — we will never agree to that,” Gene Orza, the union's No. 2 official, says.
The union insists that two or fewer players per team testing positive is “not a basis for going out every year and testing up to 1,200 players, asking them to give their urine. We start with the premise that you should not have to give your employer your urine.”
According to Orza, the survey testing is a reasonable concession by the players and all that is needed.
“We're going to find out,” he says, “whether or not the players are doing something they shouldn't be doing at a level sufficient to justify the intrusion on them that is represented by taking their urine or, in fact, that they deserve an apology.”
With all due apologies to the players, it's time they get over the issue of their sacred urine and start taking drug-testing seriously.
———
Steve Wilstein is a national sports columnist for The Associated Press. Write to him at swilstein@ap.org
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No muscle in baseball's steroid-testing plan
