What Can Fix Baseball’s Mess

WASHINGTON (AP) - Former White House drug czar Barry McCaffrey is urging Major League Baseball to adopt Olympic standards for drug testing and punishment. ‘You cannot have the chickens guarding the coop. Baseball always has and still does,’ McCaffrey said Monday. ‘Baseball and all professional sports need to adopt the same anti-drug principles we pressed for in the Olympics - outside year-round random testing with accountability, openness and independence.’

Ain’t it a shame that the government has to get involved with baseball?

You have to admit, though, McCaffrey has a point. If Barry Bonds had been submitted to random drug tests over the last five years, there would be no doubt as to the legitimacy of his home run records. Instead, we have an arrogant athlete spouting nonsense at press conferences who, when, and if he breaks gentlemanly Henry Aaron’s career record, will have an asterisk (whether figurative or literal) permanently etched by his name.

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Barry Lamar Bonds (born July 24, 1964 in Riverside, California) is a professional baseball player for the San Francisco Giants; he is most famous for his home run hitting. He holds the record for most homers in a season with 73 and is third on the career list with 703 (as of the end of the 2004 season). He is generally considered among the greatest players of all time. For those who view baseball through the prism of sabermetrics, he rounds out a top-three list that includes Babe Ruth and Ted Williams. However, he is the focus of a raging debate in the baseball world, centering on two questions: has he had help in the form of illegal performance-improving drugs, and if so, to what degree, if any, does the use of these drugs diminish his accomplishments? This debate has been further fueled by reports of testimony given in the investigation of the Bay Area Laboratory Co-operative scandal. [Encyclopedia Lockergnome]