The Chris Moeller Archives

Snow day/Snow job

Hooray, hooray! I was out at work at two o'clock thanks to a blizzard warning in western and central Iowa. It may not seem like much, but in the work-a-day world of loan counseling, every few hours of added freedom counts, and since my shift today was scheduled to go until closing at eight, I'm one of the office's big winners.

Des Moines will be clipped by sleet, rain, and six to ten inches of snow between now and Friday night, but the northwest half of Iowa will really get buried-- up to 17 inches of snow is forecast on a line between Algona and Sioux City, and they've shut down both I-80 between Omaha and Des Moines and I-35 between Des Moines and Minneapolis. Could this be the beginning of a long weekend for Moeller? With Mondays already scheduled off, I may not have to be back in the office until the 6th.

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Thoughts then turn to the fun and sun of the Grapefruit and Cactus Leagues. The so-called "steroid controversy" continues to flare up, but more and more, it has become obvious that the whole affair is nothing more than an attempt by headline-seeking Congressman and envious sportswriters to curtail the well-earned rights and freedoms of baseball employees.

I've spent the last month reading two insightful books: John Helyar's "Lords of the Realm" from 1994, which focuses on the labor/management history of the game, and Brad Snyder's brand new "A Well-Paid Slave," about Curt Flood's life and struggle for free agency in professional sports. The players' union head, Donald Fehr, says tongue-in-cheek in Helyar's book that two things have always been true if you study the history of baseball: one, that you can never have enough pitching; and two, that no one ever made any money.

I would add two more to his list upon finishing these tomes: one, that those same club owners who are always pleading poverty (and the league commissioner beneath their collective thumb) will do everything in their power to lay culpability for error at the feet of the players, keeping a precarious grip on their Congressional anti-trust exemption; and two, that the establishment of American sports journalism will be alongside at all times to trumpet those initiatives.

As they've often done since creating the Office of the Commissioner in 1920, the club owners decided to select another "independent" arbiter last year to help combat the mounting government pressure to hone up to their steroid failures, naming former Senate Majority Leader George Mitchell as an "impartial" investigator into league steroid use. Of course, Mitchell is a long-time friend of current Commissioner Bud Selig.

What Mitchell's investigation is designed to produce-- as the Detroit Tigers' Gary Sheffield pointed out earlier this week-- is a public indictment of Barry Bonds and other players, guilty or not, who Selig and Co. believe will be capable of shouldering the legislative scorn that might otherwise be directed at the club owners, the people who truly hold the responsibility of maintaining fairness on the playing field of baseball. (Specifically, their target is Bonds-- who will be tarred and feathered throughout this summer during his race for the all-time home run record, after chemically-enhancing his body over a three year time period prior to any steroid prohibitions being in place in the game.) If you doubt the intentions of "the Lords," consider that they've already leaked grand jury testimony in the BALCO case, and leaked the names on positive steroid tests beginning in 2002 in violation of the privacy language explicit in the Collective Bargaining Agreement.

Members of the sports media, always looking to protect precious clubhouse access, helped to foster the original image of the money-obsessed athlete, going back in salary disputes long before even the creation of the Players Association. They personally destroyed Curt Flood, and their efforts today are indisputably "gotcha" tactics designed to pin the blame squarely on the players. (Consider this fawning profile of the valiant Mitchell by an unnamed AP sportswriter.)

I ask you-- if steroids are such a public health scourge-- then why have the players not been portrayed as the real victims throughout all of this, rather than as alleged perpetrators upon our nation's youth? The players were the ones forced to compete with one another for some of the most exclusive jobs on the planet, in a working environment that valued gate receipts and advertising revenue above their long-term physical health. Absent any subpoena power, baseball players should fully ignore the inquiries of George Mitchell. His office was designed to make scapegoats of them and convince the public that Major League Baseball can police itself for substances Congress deems dangerous. We all know that it can't, incidently, but its customers continue to display rabid indifference to the entire issue of steroids at stadium turnstiles.

The worst that could happen if Congress intervened, other than some additional mawkish grandstanding, is that it would then take its turn proving an inability to manage a system of scientific advancement that will always stay a step ahead of the law. The potential blessing, although quite unlikely, is that it would wind up costing Major League Baseball its anti-trust protection. Then the Players Association could go about securing its members' employment rights on the level playing field of America's courts.

posted by CM @ 2:48 PM