.45 CALEBER: Chemical McCarthys Should Take a Seat

It’s 1950 all over again on Capitol Hill, and this time, the “communists” have infiltrated an even more sacred American institution than Congress—baseball, our national pastime.

If you happened to tune in to MSNBC on March 17 in the hopes of viewing the nation’s legislative body executing its solemn duty, you would have been disappointed, and perhaps even slightly frightened. There was no discussion of Social Security or foreign policy being shown that day. Instead, a long and protracted cross-examination of several unwitting targets was being conducted, targets whose defensive replies did nothing to soften the inflammatory questions being thrown at them from indignant congressmen.

And although the House Committee on Government Reform stopped short of conjuring up the ghost of Joe McCarthy in an attempt to scare Mark McGwire into admitting his once-legendary bat speed was fueled with THG and HGH, the theater—or hearing, to be official—was imbued with a sufficient sense of the surreal to make any rational baseball fan question what good could reasonably come from such staged drama.

In the wake of the testimony given last Thursday on steroids in Major League Baseball, accusations of cheating and betraying the popular trust are being continuously flung at a handful of muscled targets. The iconic figures of the sport’s recent post-strike resurgence—McGwire, Barry Bonds, and Sammy Sosa, among others—have fallen under the shadow of a suspicion that threatens to destroy their reputations and place a more permanent and shameful asterisk than the one that was applied to Maris’ 61 next to the bloated offensive records of the last 10 years.

Welcome to the official beginning of a new era in baseball—the era of “Chemical McCarthyism,” the all-too-fitting moniker given to last weekend’s tension-filled testimony by Philadelphia Phillies pitcher Randy Wolf. Just as at the reactionary height of the Cold War, Congress has taken up an issue sure to arouse passions in an effort to gain a measure of publicity and acclaim. The steroid scandal is quickly becoming the sport’s Red Scare, and the intervention of Congress is a campaign to seize the moral high ground in the affair and elevate the image of government at the expense of baseball players who have been hamstrung by mistrust.

Steroids, undoubtedly, are a large problem in modern sports in general, and baseball in particular. But if Congress had carefully examined the facts of the case, would they in good faith still have chosen to subpoena players and officials?

Baseball first instituted a testing policy for steroids in 2002. During the 2003 season, when random drug tests were administered, 83 players tested positive, while 13 more appealed their positive results, according to William Carroll of Baseball Prospectus. Last year, only 12 samples came up positive—all of which were from first time offenders.

Those numbers clearly indicate that the threat of steroid use has already declined due to the presence of testing. Furthermore, baseball significantly beefed up its policy this off-season, adding penalties for positive tests, starting with 10-day suspensions for a first offense. The threat of a suspension, and the public ignominy that would necessarily accompany it, will undoubtedly further diminish the minimal percentage of tests that were returned positive last year.

Into this steadily improving situation stepped the Reform Committee, tearing open a healing wound and pouring a little salt in it for good measure. Fans surely do deserve a sincere commitment from baseball to clean up the game, but they had already received that commitment prior to the events of last Thursday, and will continue to receive it from within the baseball establishment, without the help of showboating politicians.

Everyone can agree that steroid use needs to be eliminated. But all those who watched the hearings could not help but feel a pang of sympathy for McGwire, who after his painful testimony has gone from a loved, classy hero to Public Enemy Number One. The former Home Run King has been called a cheater, even though he was well within his rights in denying answering questions about steroid use. If indeed McGwire juiced up, critics should consider the lack of a ban before 2002, as well as the highly ambiguous and unproven effects of steroids on actual performance, before throwing Big Mac off of baseball’s Mt. Olympus.

McGwire’s fateful utterance—“I’m not here to discuss the past”—should be taken to heart by both Congress and baseball alike. There is no sense in persecuting players who may have taken steroids prior to the ban in 2002, or in trying to reconfigure records tainted by the needle. All that can be done is to move forward with the best policy possible. Baseball has shown that it is committed to fixing the problem, and it will continue to be committed long after Congress has given up its act.

—Staff writer Caleb W. Peiffer can be reached at cpeiffer@fas.harvard.edu. His column appears on alternate Wednesdays.