In Defense of A-Rod

Major League Baseball has long been implicitly encouraging doping by doling out lax penalties to athletes caught taking performance-enhancing drugs. If MLB truly believes that steroids pervert the sanctity of baseball, it needs to reflect that belief with penalties that fit the crime.

Earlier this month, an Arbitration Panel curtailed Rodriguez’s original 211-game suspension to a 162-game suspension—unprecedented penalties for doping either way. Though he never tested positive for using PED’s, there was overwhelming evidence linking him to the Biogenesis doping ring.

According to his “nutritionist,” Anthony Bosch, Rodriguez followed a strict doping regimen and used elaborate schemes to avoid getting caught. However, it is unfair to judge Rodriguez without first analyzing the special relationship between the MLB and performance-enhancing drugs. In light of MLB’s ambiguous historic policy on PED’s, it is easy to understand what drove Alex Rodriguez to dope; he matured in an era where steroids were ubiquitous among top performers and were not only tolerated but also indirectly encouraged.

The “steroids era,” which ran from the late 80s through the early 2000s, took off after the players strike in 1994-95 when MLB attendance and revenue were sinking. MLB implicitly encouraged the use of steroids by lavishing players suspected of using steroids with MVP awards, media attention, and huge contracts. During 1998, the “Year of the Homer,” MLB heavily promoted the homerun showdown between Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa, two sluggers who have since tested positive for PED’s. Doping essentially became a right of passage to join the top cadre of sluggers.

Even though MLB banned PED’s in 1991, it took no action to penalize violators until 2005 and didn’t even start testing for them until 2003. In that year, after being caught doping, Rodriguez wasn’t penalized. Even after admitting to doping then, he maintained his endorsements and continued to be a fan favorite. He must have figured that there was a gentleman’s agreement between MLB and the players: as long as there were no egregious violations, doping would be tolerated.

MLB took serious action only under pressure from Congress in 2005, when it instated 10-day suspensions for first-time violations, 30-day suspensions for second-time violations, 60-day suspensions for third-time violations, and a one-year ban for fourth-time violations.

Only when Congress deemed these penalties to be too light, did MLB revise the penalties so that first-time violators would get 50-game suspension, second-time violators would get a 100-game suspension, and third-time violators would be suspended for life. In 2008, MLB finally increased testing for PED’s after the Mitchell Report exposed how rampant MLB doping culture truly was.

In past doping scandals, MLB has notoriously turned a blind eye. Although Barry Bonds was indicted in the Bay Area Laboratory Co-Operative scandal, he never received a suspension for using PED’s. He claimed that he’d unwittingly taken PED’s and never intended to have a leg up over his competition. Only after Bonds retired and could no longer draw crowds to its games did MLB passive-aggressively stall his entry to the Baseball Hall of Fame.

Although the prevalence of doping was common knowledge during the steroids era, MLB claimed that it could do nothing about it because the player’s union was too powerful and gladly looked the other way. However, once the BALCO scandal was exposed and Congress began to pressure MLB to take action, the player’s union suddenly wasn’t as powerful as MLB had made it out to be. Just as MLB used the bogus excuse that it was powerless to enforce mandatory drug tests, it was also quick to accept Bonds’s outrageous claim of ignorance regarding his positive drug test.

Baseball teams and fans should also shoulder some of the blame for encouraging PED use because they have historically been too forgiving of offenders and have rewarded past dopers with ever-larger contracts. The Yankees didn’t hesitate to play Rodriguez once he had appealed his doping suspension, and the Cardinals signed Jhonny Peralta for about triple his previous salary soon after he sat out his 50-game doping suspension.

Rather than severely punishing one superstar and maintaining a relatively lax policy for everyone else, MLB should make it clear to its players that doping doesn’t pay—they won’t get to keep their multimillion-dollar salaries signed under false pretenses and won’t be honored in the Hall of Fame.

MLB should instate an anti-doping policy similar to that of the Olympics, where any athlete caught doping is stripped of all his medals and is banned from competition for four years. Teams and fans also have to take a tough stance against doping and should put the sanctity of the game above winning.

Diamondbacks reliever Brad Ziegler summed up the current baseball dilemma best: “It pays to cheat...Thanks, owners, for encouraging PED use.”

Ethan S. H. Fried ’16, a Crimson editorial writer, is an Applied Mathematics concentrator in Eliot House.