Baseball’s Underbelly: Why Mitchell Matters
Dec 17th, 2007 • Posted in: Commentaryby Rushworth M. Kidder
By the time the lid blew off, it was a huge organization, raking in millions and enriching everyone with a stake in it. After ticking along slowly for years, it took off in the 1990s. Breaking record after record, it became the darling of a wildly cheering public.
There were allegations of impropriety, of course. But given the panache, the riveting self-confidence, and those never-ending, sky-high numbers, people were too smitten to care.
Did insiders know something was amiss? Certainly. Did they suspect this phenomenal success was too good to be true? No doubt. But no one blew the whistle until the whole thing began to collapse. That’s when reputations were destroyed. Even Congress got into the act, calling for tough new standards. In the end, of course, it went bankrupt and some of its top people went to jail.
If that last sentence caught you by surprise, you probably thought I was describing Major League Baseball. No, I was talking about Enron.
But that’s the point. The story of professional baseball’s immersion in illegal behavior isn’t new. George Mitchell’s investigative report on what he calls “the steroids era,” released last week by one of the nation’s most distinguished elder statesman, has deservedly received a lot of attention. But if it sounds faintly familiar — if it strikes us, in Yogi Berra’s immortal words, as “déjà vu all over again” — that’s because it is. We’ve been here before, watching as unpunished fraud grows deeper and more virulent right before our eyes.
When the Mitchell report concludes, for example, that “there was a collective failure to recognize the problem as it emerged and to deal with it early on” — and that “as a result, an environment developed in which illegal use became widespread” — that’s an exact characterization of the infamous pillars of corporate sleaze from the Enron Age. And when Mitchell writes that “everyone involved in baseball over the past two decades — Commissioners, club officials, the Players Association, and players — shares to some extent the responsibility for the steroids era,” you only need to change a few words to make his chilling assessment of blame perfectly applicable to Enron.
Perfectly, that is, except that the Mitchell report left out one crucial actor: the public. Public denial made possible both the Enron Age and the steroids era. Just as we who had retirement funds found it delicious to watch our portfolios charge upward, so we fans were having too much fun seeing home-run records shattered. Maybe it was all a sleight of hand, a set of phony numbers, or a glut of illegal substances. If so, we didn’t want to know.
That’s why the cold, clear logic of Sen. Mitchell’s report is so compelling. He’s not writing only for the baseball commissioner (who asked for the report), or the Players Association (which apparently stonewalled it), or the players (who already knew what he’s reporting). He’s writing for all of us. In the end, we in the bleachers are the ones who need to be persuaded that drug use in professional athletics is intolerable.
But why? The public is increasingly aware of what the report calls “the deleterious health effects of long-term use” of performance-enhancing drugs. With this report, Mitchell adds three additional arguments:
Since the drugs are illegal, players often purchase them on the black market, where there is no control of their quality and purity. If an illegal drug is bad enough for your health, what about a badly manufactured illegal drug?
That illegality gives the drug dealer leverage over the buyer. If high-visibility players are in positions to be threatened with exposure unless, say, they help their teams lose certain games, the threat of extortion is enormous.
Players, Mitchell writes, have “responsibilities as role models to young athletes.” The fact that “hundreds of thousands of high school-aged people are … illegally using steroids,” coupled with findings that adolescents are more vulnerable than adults to damage from performance-enhancing substances, elevates this issue to crisis proportions.
Bottom line? Even cynics who dismiss professional baseball as closer to entertainment than athletics can understand the danger of bad models on impressionable youth. That danger, in the end, appears to have provoked Mitchell’s controversial decision to name so many names. If publishing even one name saves the life of even one teenager who might otherwise have emulated that career, there’s an ethical case for publication.
But the final question remains: Even if we know these players used drugs, will we care? Do we think of professional athletes merely as humanoids, useful only so long as they win games and break records, but designed to be discarded when they finally break down under the influence of all those drugs they took for our amusement and their enrichment? Or do we care enough about them and the game they play to want them to be physically and morally healthy members of our society — and to want the game to continue and prosper?
We’ll know Mitchell’s report has been successful when the baseball fans, like Enron watchers, join him in expressing genuine, sustained disgust over those who cheat.
©2007 Institute for Global Ethics
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