Confidential, With an Asterisk

NY Times by: DOUG GLANVILLE

I can understand why there are so many calls for the heads of the 104 players on the so-called “list” that marks them as guilty for testing positive in the 2003 survey drug test. It seems that publishing this list once and for all would make us all feel better. We could put this chapter behind us, convince ourselves that everyone not on the list is clean as a whistle, and rest assured the game would never return to such disgrace.

But it would be a Pyrrhic victory, at best.

The 2003 drug test was a “survey” test. It was devised to establish the extent of the drug culture in baseball. Instead of just running with innuendo, rumor and guesswork, the Players Association decided that they needed to actually find out for sure.

So this test was put in place to get a true number. It also allowed players a safe place to be truthful (or sloppy). And it is safe to assume that the assurance that the results wouldn’t leave the premises persuaded some to not mask their samples to hide a potential positive result. Here was a chance to actually be forthright, and give the league a truer sense of the extent of a problem that needed to be addressed. Ironically, the players who may have found ways to beat the test seem to be better off today. Those players are quietly in the “clean” column and those who were either sloppy enough or open enough to provide a real sample, which helped move this testing policy forward, are about to get a Scarlet Letter.

The tests were contingent on some semblance of confidentiality. No player in the game would have ever agreed to a collectively bargained drug policy if they had been told beforehand that the results would end up in the public domain. Sure, if the government found a way to bypass that, then we would have had to comply, but instead we got this chronic leaking of confidential and anonymous information after five years, with only selective players being “outed.” Kind of shady. Well, if this is for such a good cause, then why the negative approach? Why pick and chose who gets the center square stockade? How about we start leaking the names of the other 1000 players that didn’t test positive? That would be nice change of pace, but whoever is leaking this information isn’t playing nice, at all.

I enjoyed the chapter in the book “Freakonomics” about how the true hazard of a situation often falls short of the outrage. We can be fuming about something, but it may not be the most pernicious problem. Of course I have no love for the drug culture in baseball — it was pervasive and, by raising the performance level in the league, probably contributed to shortening of my career — but systems have and will continue to be put in place to curb what will be an ongoing problem. No list of 104 guys being splashed up on your home page will change that.

Nevertheless, there is a lot of outrage being spewed, and I understand. Something dear has been lost. The culture of a game that had the rare ability to bridge generations of fans and players has been broken. Before the steroid era, a home run was a home run and we could look at and admire and compare the achievements of Mantle, Aaron, Kaline, Ruth, Schmidt, and Mays and feel like we were speaking the same language. The steroid era wipes that out: the magic created on the field starts to seem artificial, patronizing us, appeasing us, making us doubt whether we are truly seeing what we are seeing.

But we need to pay close attention to our outrage because the precedent set by allowing confidential and anonymous collectively bargained tests to be completely breached is a bigger problem. It creates the impression that agreements between employers and employees on policies and procedures can be thrown out at any time, just because someone felt they had the right to know. In such a world, what would prevent your employer from taking your drug test result at C.V.S., at I.B.M. or maybe the hospital you work for and slap it up on the Internet tomorrow?

Granted, somewhere in the morass is a federal investigation, which often changes the rules of these kinds of things. But while investigating the players wrapped up in the BALCO affair, all players got cast in its shadow. This led to the samples not being destroyed as planned since the union could not destroy what could have been evidence in an ongoing investigation. The union was just following the law.

(So if the test was anonymous, you might ask, why is there some key out there to match up the names with the numbers? Answer. There had to be some way to trace back in the event someone lost a sample, or it got tainted, or there could have been a false positive giving the players some right to re-test. )

I don’t know who or which organization is leaking these names. But, I find this act more outrageous than that of the players who tested positive. At least these players helped the game take a step towards putting a better policy in place. It may not have been out of nobility, but at least it was real. I do find it curious that whenever a player is arrogant and bold enough to declare his “cleanliness” he quickly gets nailed by their 2003 positive test. To me, it appears more like a targeted impeachment process. I am not crying for those players’ choices, but what is happening to them is telling.

Certainly, I can understand the frustration of the investigators. When all is said and done, these players are simply “users,” low men on the totem pole of a drug scheme. The players lying at hearings and in the media are creating a distraction and getting in the way of the investigators’ ability to do their job. They are also inhibiting their need to focus on the more significant issues, like the suppliers and the source of these drugs. We’re talking amounts that are changing local economies, not the meager thousands of dollars these guys spent in a year on their “fix.”

I think the release of this list of 104 would be a travesty. The promise of confidentiality was in place to allow players to be more willing to provide a true test. We can’t go back and change the rules after the fact and then claim we are now noble and honorable. I want drugs out of the game, too, but there is more effective, long-term way to go about it that doesn’t compromise principals that make the rule of law in our country so unique.