It’s awfully big of Major League Baseball union boss Michael Weiner to declare that steroid users should be in the Baseball Hall of Fame, considering the organization he runs, the Players Association, was the biggest culprit in the scandal that damaged the game.
“It’s a museum,” Weiner told the crowd last week at the National Press Club. “If you want to have some notation on their plaque that indicates that they were either judged to have used performance-enhancing substances or accused of having done that, so be it.”
OK, here’s a notation: “We would have stuck syringes in our eyes before we would have let baseball have tough drug testing of our members, and it was only when we were dragged before Congress and humiliated, and our members fearing prosecution, did we finally relent and go along with a worthy testing program. Otherwise, A-Rod would have about 700 career home runs by now.”
How’s that for a notation?
Maybe Weiner could come back to Washington this week and testify for Roger Clemens in his perjury retrial, which is scheduled to start Monday in federal court in the District with jury selection.
As a rationalization for voting in cheaters, Weiner somehow equates the statistically inflated figures of the steroid era to that of owners who may wind up in the Hall of Fame who “engaged in a massive conspiracy called collusion to defraud the fans of free competition.”
Weiner continued, “Those people belong in the Hall of Fame as well. So, from my perspective, the Hall of Fame is for the best baseball players and most influential executives that have been involved, and they should all be in.”
Collusion by the owners was foolish and wrong. But to claim that the fans somehow were deprived of something because free agency could not flourish properly is ridiculous. Or didn’t you Nationals fans realize that the $126 million contract Jayson Werth signed was for your benefit — a gift of sorts from the players union?
Here’s another form of collusion that was far more damaging to the game and fans — the union members who colluded to cheat and use performance-enhancing substances to make more money and take jobs away from other union members who chose to play by the rules.
The players union colluded against its own members by refusing to embrace strict drug testing.
Michael Weiner, like Andy Pettitte, “misremembers” the role his union played in the steroid scandal. We’ll all get a reminder this week in a Washington courtroom.
Examiner columnist Thom Loverro is the co-host of “The Sports Fix” from noon to 2 p.m. Monday through Friday on ESPN980 and espn980.com. Contact him at [email protected].
