Under capitalism, money ultimately ruins everything, even the games that are designed to divert workers from the wars and fascism rising around us. On December 13, Major League Baseball released the Mitchell Report, which told us what we already knew: that baseball — like the Olympics, the Tour de France, and every other big-money sport — is hopelessly infected with performance-enhancing drugs.
After naming more than 80 players, from superstars like Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens to average players like Paul LoDuca, former U.S. Senator George Mitchell declared that “everyone” in baseball was to blame for the spread of anabolic steroids and human growth hormone (HGH), from club management to the players’ union. But when it gets down to cases, the report essentially convicts individual players and low-level pushers like Kirk Radomski, the one-time Mets’ bat boy, while giving a pass to Commissioner Bud Selig and the owners and executives who have seen no evil as long as their profits and bonuses kept rolling in.
As Dave Zirin notes in his online column, Edge of Sports, the report was stacked from the beginning. Mitchell was appointed by Selig, whose family owned the Milwaukee Brewers until 2005. The ex-senator sits on the boards of the Boston Red Sox and the Walt Disney Company (which owns ESPN), and his law firm has earned tens of millions of dollars by lobbying for Big Tobacco and General Electric. Mitchell is a high-priced mouthpiece for his corporate bosses, first and last. His report gives baseball executives some needed damage control on the steroid front, along with leverage to re-open contracts with the Players Association in the owners’ ongoing struggle to grab a bigger slice of the money pie.
For communists, there is no “good” side in this controversy. In their desperation to gain an edge in the brutally competitive major leagues, the players — from the surly Barry Bonds to the God-fearing Andy Pettite — have been corrupted into liars, cheaters, and hypocrites. They bear responsibility for the countless high school athletes and insecure adolescents who ape their drug-enhanced heroes on the path to torn tendons, liver and kidney damage, diabetes, heart attacks, depression, and suicide.
But as in every enterprise in this society, the owners paint the landscape. As Howard Bryant points out in Juicing the Game (Viking, 2005), baseball’s steroid era was born in 1994, when a player strike led to a cancelled World Series, depressed attendance, and a sharp drop in network television revenues. The owners’ response was to lure back the fans and sponsors with artificially inflated home run totals. They built smaller ballparks, shrank the strike zone — and looked the other way at rampant steroid use. In 1998, when an AP reporter spotted a vial of androstenedione (a “legal” steroid developed in East Germany) in Mark McGwire’s locker as McGwire was en route to his record 70 home runs, “the entire baseball establishment,” Bryant wrote, “crushed…the story.” (In contrast to the media’s racist focus on Bonds, McGwire remained an all-American hero until 2005, when he humiliated himself by dodging questions at a Congressional hearing.) In 2001, the owners renewed their five-year TV contract with Fox for $2 billion, nearly four times higher than the previous contract.
To date, only two middling major leaguers have received 15-day suspensions in the aftermath of the Mitchell report, but no matter how the sport changes as a result of the report, history tells us that baseball will remain business as usual — an enterprise run by capitalists for capitalists, with the next season’s profits the only record that matters.
Posted by challengenewspaper
