Baseball's steroid policy is twofold: Philosophically, it is zero tolerance. Pragmatically, it is see no evil.
Without testing, baseball's drug policies are as toothless as a World War I reunion. Its pious policies carry less weight than an Adam Sandler Film Festival. At best, baseball polices steroids with a blind eye. At worst, it winks. At present, the problem is so pervasive that Jose Canseco's allegations and Ken Caminiti's admissions have elicited a national yawn.
Pity.
"You can bury your head in the sand," Priscilla Oppenheimer said yesterday afternoon, "but if you do it too long, you will choke on the sand."
Oppenheimer is the Padres' director of minor league operations and architect of one of the game's most aggressive steroid-prevention programs. But because the Major League Baseball Players Association refuses to negotiate on testing, despite charges it is more interested in collective bargaining than it is in group health, Oppenheimer's efforts are confined to the minor leagues.
Her efforts, she knows, can achieve only limited success.
"Steroids are like this ghost we all know is there and no one knows how to address it," she said. "We consider it a very serious problem, but it's always been a shame that the things we can teach the minor leaguers, as soon as players hit the major leagues, it's done."
The Padres test randomly at the minor league level, and repeatedly if a player produces a positive sample. If a player tests positive, he is steered to a doctor. To date, Oppenheimer said, no Padres prospect has tested positive twice.
Yet Oppenheimer estimates as many as one-third of her farmhands could still be chemically enhanced, willing to risk detection and/or able to escape it.
Until major league baseball implemented a more comprehensive testing program in the minor leagues last year, the Padres and Houston Astros were belived to be the only clubs performing random testing for performance-enhancing drugs. Presumably, the incidence of steroid use was higher in those places that had ignored the problem.
Some teams say it's too expensive to test prospects, and that that expense is hard to justify so long as major leaguers can shoot up with impunity. Much as executives want to protect their investment in their minor league prospects, they are naturally leery of unilateral disarmament, of weeding out players who could excel in some other uniform. They remember what Caminiti was like in 1996.
Players, who have shorter memories and fleeting attention, tend to focus on today's payoff rather than tomorrow's perils. They see the performance bar being raised and they resolve to clear it at any cost. They show less concern about getting caught than a Manhattan jaywalker.
"Unless the repercussions are more, why not take that chance?" Oppenheimer said. "I can see where they (players) can say, 'If this will get me in the big leagues for three years, that's better than not getting there at all.' I can see that (argument) is pretty persuasive."
Wealth and fame are powerful narcotics, and many an aspiring ballplayer has willingly swapped some long-term health for some short-term stardom. Caminiti is the first former big leaguer to come clean, but every clubhouse has players pumped up like Popeye through illegal injections.
Canseco – whose numbers could be inflated for the purposes of selling his memoirs – is on record estimating that as many as 85 percent of major leaguers are juiced. He vows to name names in his book, but he could probably save us all some tedious reading by simply naming the players he considers clean.
While Canseco's tease could have been dismissed as a transparent attempt to sell books, Caminiti's confession carries no obvious ulterior motive. It rings terribly, frighteningly true.
Until Caminiti revealed his steroid history, the performance-enhancing drug was baseball's dirty little secret. Now, steroids are its lasting shame. Lingering doubts about the validity of recent home run records have given way to open skepticism.
Worse, generations of young players – some of them still in high school – have become sold on the steroid shortcut. They shoot up in order to keep up with the competition; to gain the muscle mass that turns their routine fly balls into home runs. They make their sordid deals with the devil, often failing to read the fine print, sometimes setting themselves up for future strokes or sterility.
Typically, the rudderless sport appears powerless in the face of its problem.
"Maybe (Commissioner) Bud Selig should make it a point of collective bargaining," said Brad Kullman, the Cincinnati Reds' director of baseball administration. "He could say, 'We want to make it mandatory. We want all players to use steroids.' That way, the union would insist on testing."
The Major League Drug Policy declares, "There is no place for illegal drug use in Baseball." In practice, that's just preaching.
