SPORT / Dave Zirin : Decriminalize Baseball!

Ryan Braun isn't Al Capone. Image from Deadspin.

Decriminalize the game:
A solution to baseball’s drug wars

I love baseball and it’s tragic to watch it self-devour.

By Dave Zirin / The Rag Blog / June 5, 2013

See Thorne Dreyer's articles about progressive sportswriter Dave Zirin at The Rag Blog, and at Truthout, and listen to our March 22, 2013, Rag Radio interview with Zirin.

If you want to know what’s wrong with Major League Baseball, look no further than today's top headlines. Described as “the largest [Performance Enhancing Drug scandal] in American sports history,” at least 20 Major League Baseball players now face significant suspensions for PED use.

Included in the guilty-until-proven-innocent public parade are Yankee albatross Alex Rodriguez and the man Buster Olney is calling “the Lance Armstrong of baseball," Milwaukee Brewers star Ryan Braun. [The latter is in reference to Braun’s Shermanesque denials over the last two years that he ever imbibed in pharmaceutical help, not his ability to master the Pyrenees.]

MLB has leaked the names of the accused because they have confidence in their source. His name is Anthony “Tony” Bosch and he is the former director of Biogenesis, a now shuttered South Florida “anti-aging clinic." Tony Bosch is not a doctor nor does he play one on TV. He did, however, have a roster of “patients” whom he allegedly supplied with all manner of banned substances.

MLB was in the process of suing Biogensis when the near-bankrupt Bosch, unable to afford a proper legal defense, chose to turn over every scrawled receipt, hand-written ledger, and appointment book to MLB officials. In return, they have reportedly pledged to stop their civil suit and use their political clout to halt the Justice Department’s forthcoming criminal indictment.

Forget your personal feelings about whether you like or dislike A-Rod or whether you think these players are worse than Pol Pot for “cheating the game.” Forget if you're convinced there is no greater evil than a pill that helps an adult professional athlete heal from injuries or work out with greater efficiency.

Forget it all and consider the disturbing audacity of what Major League Baseball just accomplished: a powerful private corporation has used its political connections with the Justice Department as well as the power of its own purse to squeeze a weaker business to disclose confidential medical records. America!

If that doesn’t bother you, perhaps this will. According to Major League Baseball’s collective bargaining agreement with the players' union, the league can impose a 50-game suspension for a first PED offense, 100 games for a second offense, and a lifetime ban for a third.

In this case, according to sources, the league will be pursuing 100 game suspensions for every player deemed guilty on the basis that it’s really two offenses in one. Their mere connection to Bosch is one strike, and any previous denial that they were connected to Bosch -- in other words lying to MLB officials -- constitutes a second.

Yes, you don’t even have to fail a drug test. You just need to be around drugs and make statements that Commissioner Bud Selig unilaterally determines to be a lie. It’s like a kid’s baseball book co-written by Mike Lupica and George Orwell.

Tony Bosch.

This should be calling the entire system into question but many baseball writers are instead already writing paeans to Bud Selig's tough justice. ESPN’s Jayson Stark wrote, “[I]f Tony Bosch sings the song that baseball firmly believes he's about to sing, some of the biggest names in this sport could pay a monstrous price. And the aftershocks will be rattling baseball's Richter Scale for generations to come."

This is not an earthquake. Instead it will be death by 10,000 paper cuts. The union will protest the idea that there could ever be two suspensions for one offense and appeals will drag on for years. The only thing “rattling” in future generations will be the skeletons of what once comprised the fan base of this sport.

I love baseball and it’s tragic to watch it self-devour, so here is my own humble advice about a different way to handle this. Steroids and all PEDs need to be seen as an issue of public health, not crime and punishment. If seen as an issue of public health, the scandal here would not be that a group of players may have used PEDs. The scandal would be that they had to visit a skuzzy, unregulated “clinic” not run by medical professionals to get their drugs.

Instead of criminalization, educate all players about the harmful effects of long-term PED use when not under a doctor’s supervision. Have medical officials make the policy and determine what PEDs help a person heal faster -- an admirable quality in a medicine, no? -- and what shouldn't be a part of any training regimen. Centralize distribution under the umbrella of MLB so it doesn’t become an arms race of which teams get the best doctors and the best drugs.

Then, players could take advantage of the most effective new medicines and MLB would be removing the process out of the shadows where the Tony Bosch types of the world hold sway. They also then have an ethical basis for testing and rehabilitation when use crosses the line into abuse.

This solution won’t please the purists who revere a game that never existed. It won’t please the anti-steroid furies who think that the behavior of children is determined in Pavlovian fashion by the actions of Major League Baseball players. It certainly won’t please baseball’s owners who like a system where fleecing cities out of millions in tax money isn’t cheating but taking a pill to work out longer is.

It would however finally at long last take the game out of the courts, off of the front pages, and put it back on the field. Bud Selig isn’t Eliot Ness and Ryan Braun isn’t Al Capone. It’s time to stop the madness and decriminalize the game.

This article was also posted to The Nation blog.

[Dave Zirin is sports editor at The Nation and the author of the new book, Game Over: How Politics Has Turned the Sports World Upside Down (The New Press). Contact him at edgeofsports@gmail.com. Read more articles by Dave Zirin on The Rag Blog.]

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Steve Russell : The Unlikely Story of Dr. Wahoo, Professor Illiniwek, and RGIII

Chief Illiniwok, the long-embattled mascot of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, was retired in 2007. Illiniwok was opposed by American Indian groups and others for perpetuating cultural stereotypes. Native American caricatures live on as mascots in Cleveland and Washington, D.C. Image from The Society Pages.
The unlikely story of Dr. Wahoo,
Professor Illiniwek, and RGIII

We Indians cut our own throats when we discourage academic ambition, but it’s time that non-Indians understand when they tolerate Indian mascots, they cut our children’s throats with imaginary tomahawks.

By Steve Russell / The Rag Blog / February 15, 2013

Lots of things have followed me into my second retirement. Some, like continuing work with Indian graduate students, are a source of delight. Others less so. I am reminded that I failed to change the world.

The National Science Foundation just sent me the 2011 report on earned PhDs. I immediately headed for the graph that breaks down the numbers by race/ethnicity.

Like all credentials, the PhD can represent more aspiration than reality, but the aspiration is worthy by any measure. The objective of a doctoral dissertation is to add to the total store of human knowledge in a measurable way.

It’s true that some PhD granting schools are more rigorous than others, the same as undergraduate schools.

My claim is not that the credential is infallible evidence of the accomplishment it is supposed to represent. We all know better than that. But it’s also more than just the union card for the professoring trade, and the more tribal citizens with advanced degrees -- PhD, MD, JD, or others -- the more 21st century possibilities are open to the tribe, not just the individuals who get the degrees. So, yes, if my academic career has involved advancing Indians on the micro level, one student at a time, I remain highly interested in the macro level.

I remember a discussion about the minimum number of Indian lawyers it would take to form a section of the American Bar Association and realizing it would require us to literally sign up every known Indian with a law degree (at the time) to what is a voluntary and quite expensive organization (to which I currently do not belong). I remember talking with a non-Indian MD who was working off his school debts with the Indian Health Service and coming to the realization that he did not think much of Indians. I don’t like the view at the bottom of the barrel.

In the 2011 numbers, I noted that Hispanics, at 2,006 new PhDs, surpassed African-Americans, at 1,953. This has been a continuing trend because Hispanics (16.7% of the population) outnumber blacks (13.1%). American Indians, even by the expansive new definition that doubled the numbers, and even adding Native Hawaiians, are only 1.4% of the population. Number of new PhDs? 136.

Let’s review.

African-Americans are about 13.1% of the population and produced about 6.14% of the new PhDs.

Hispanics are about 16.7% of the population and produced 6.31%.

Indigenous persons are, on paper, 1.4% of the population, a number that is greatly overstated by self-reporting from the Elizabeth Warrens of the world. We produced .43% of the new PhDs.

I watched similar numbers for years involving the JD degree. We are growing in absolute numbers, and we’ll continue to get better because education is as hereditary as lack of education. I am a first generation college student and all four of my kids went to college. So, are we satisfied?

I’m not satisfied, and every time I hear a bright Indian kid accused of “thinking white” for the sin of thinking, I want to revert to savage stereotype.

When Indians do something positive, we are quick to offer cultural explanations for our superiority. It’s about time culture took some of the rap for our academic underperformance.

You want more evidence? Asians are about 5% of the population and snagged over 9% of the new PhDs. I’ve never heard of an Asian kid being accused of “thinking white” or of trying to elevate herself above her peers.

Speaking of savage stereotypes, some people would say that the problem of our lack of success in education is a problem way bigger than, say, Indian mascots.

With that painful sight of Robert Griffin III going down on his knee the wrong way, I was reminded that I care about him as an exciting rookie player from my neck of the woods while I root for the Washington team to lose, always.

RGIII played his high school ball at Copperas Cove and his college ball at Baylor. He’s one of those new wave running quarterbacks. You never know if he is going to hand it to the running back, throw it, or take off. More to the point, neither does the defense.

So why, oh why, did he have to get drafted by the Washington team?

In 2008, a refereed article appeared in the journal Basic and Applied Psychology, “Of Warrior Chiefs and Indian Princesses: The Psychological Consequences of American Indian Mascots.” Like most science, it contains more mathematics than opinions, but I’ll skip the math and go to the money shot in the abstract:

We suggest that American Indian mascots are harmful because they remind American Indians of the limited ways others see them and, in this way, constrain how they can see themselves.

We Indians cut our own throats when we discourage academic ambition, but it’s time that non-Indians understand when they tolerate Indian mascots, they cut our children’s throats with imaginary tomahawks.

The public Indian comes in two versions, primitive relic or romantic warrior, both doomed. Historical figures, feared in the past, pitied in the present, irrelevant to the future.

When I was a professor at the University of Texas-San Antonio, they still had an affirmative action plan. It did not call for the recruitment of Indians, citing the lack of Indian PhDs in the talent pool. There was a hiring goal for Asian males, but none for Indians of any gender.

There were two Indians on the faculty. The other guy did not get tenured. I did, but I took an offer at a Research I school... where I was one of two Indians. Again, I was the only one of the two of us to get tenured, but they hired three more and we discovered another who had never before made himself known. Two of the three hires left by the time I did.

If Indian students did not get mentored by non-Indians, they would never get mentored. Not that the lack of mentors is the major problem. The major problem is that most research universities contain more dead Indians as “scientific data” than live Indians as students.

I was born in a small town in Oklahoma where the most numerous minority was Indians. Only one in my age cohort finished high school. I myself made it only to the ninth grade. We expected no more of ourselves than the public schools expected of us, and we had no educated role models.

That has not changed, and we’ve had about all the “honoring” by turning us into mascots that we can stand.

I wish RGIII all the best for a quick recovery, and for the day he plays for a team that does not disadvantage Indian children.

[Steve Russell lives in Sun City, Texas, near Austin. He is a Texas trial court judge by assignment and associate professor emeritus of criminal justice at Indiana University-Bloomington. Steve was an activist in Austin in the sixties and seventies, and wrote for Austin’s underground paper, The Rag. Steve, who belongs to the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma, is also a columnist for Indian Country Today. He can be reached at swrussel@indiana.edu. Read more articles by Steve Russell on The Rag Blog.]

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