The big news at today's House Oversight and Government Reform Committee hearing on the Mitchell Report was that the committee is asking Attorney General Michael Mukasey to investigate whether Houston Astros shortstop Miguel Tejada committed perjury in telling the committee in August 2005 that he hadn't used performance-enhancing drugs. Two separate sources told Senator Mitchell that they had helped Tejada acquire steroids and human-growth hormone. (The Orioles' decision to unload him looks pretty good right about now.) But the hearing also made clear that baseball is at risk of falling behind in the next front of the battle against cheating in baseball.
Commissioner Bud Selig and players' union chief Don Fehr, who testified at the hearing, deserve credit for accepting responsibility for their past mistakes and for successfully cracking down on the use of anabolic steroids. In three areas, though, representatives exposed baseball's apparent failure to be proactive in combating other types of performance enhancers:
1. The medical-exemption loophole. Rep. John Tierney (D–Mass.) asked Selig about a disturbing statistic that was not included in the Mitchell Report (in fact, according to Tierney, Congress had to pry the information out of the league). Big-leaguers are banned from taking stimulants like Ritalin and Adderall unless it's needed for a medical condition like ADD. In 2006, the league granted 28 exemptions for players to take stimulants. In 2007, the number skyrocketed to 103--implying that the incidence of ADD in baseball is on the order of eight times greater than in the general population. Needless to say, that's not realistic. The use of amphetamines in baseball is not new (Jim Bouton wrote about them in his famous 1970 exposé Ball Four), but it appears the use of stimulants is on the rise as players, now deprived of steroids, look for any edge they can get. Selig seemed bizarrely cavalier about the issue, characerizing it as a matter between players and their doctors (who must approve the medical-exemption application), and only reluctantly agreed that these startling numbers might constitute a problem.
2. HGH. Another substitute for steroids is human-growth hormone (HGH), and even Selig and Fehr acknowledged that the use of HGH is on the rise in baseball. They argued that there's nothing they can do about it, though, since there's no commercially available urine test for HGH. (The league is joining with the NFL to fund research into such a test.) But that's not the end of the story. A blood-based test for HGH is expected to be ready in time for the Beijing Olympics, but baseball doesn't currently allow for blood testing, and the union opposes it. Rep. Stephen Lynch (D–Mass.) pressed Selig and Fehr to commit to adopting the earliest available HGH test (and, if necessary, take samples now and store them until the test is ready), but they seemed reluctant to embrace his proposal.
3. Gene doping. This is the most speculative, but far-reaching, cheating strategy on the horizon: the possibility of using gene therapy to improve athletic performance. It's certainly unrealistic to expect baseball to have any well-defined strategy yet for dealing with it, but when Rep. Mark Souder (R–Ind.) asked Selig about it, Selig seemed not to understand what Souder was talking about. He asked Souder to repeat the question three times, and then gave a brief, generic answer about baseball having hired the best anti-doping doctors in the country. This doesn't inspire much confidence that baseball will be ahead of the curve. (Fehr, for his part, recognized that "Gene doping will make this discussion we're having today look quaint," but if history is any indication, whenever anyone proposes any actual measures to combat the problem, the players' union will probably oppose it.)
Baseball has made real progress in curbing the use of performance-enhancing drugs. And it's important, as Mitchell implores, not to get hung up on the past. But one can't help but get the feeling that the league is only willing to go as far as public pressure and congressional finger-wagging force it to. Baseball's record on steroids should make clear that the burden of proof is on the league to demonstrate that it's doing everything humanly possible to fight performance-enhancing drugs. That's a standard it's not living up to.
--Josh Patashnik
(Photo: Getty Images)