By: Andy Kissko, AndyKissko@yahoo.com

Night #5 of Kwanzaa: Nia. Nia suggests to us that when you are setting your personal goals and making resolutions, keep in mind to ensure that these benefit the community. I find this applicable to players who are deciding whether or not to take performance enhancing drugs. They should think about how their choice would impact those around them like fellow players, the fans, and the sport itself- basically anyone mentioned in my previous article (Ujamaa). Oh, then I hope they choose not to use PEDs.

Night #6 of Kwanzaa: Kuumba. This night’s principle encourages us to use our creativity for the purpose of bettering the community. I hope Donald Fehr, Bud Selig and the other powers-that-be within baseball make use of Kuumba to solve its complex array of problems. The problems that I think will take the most creativity to solve are defining more clearly which drugs are legal and illegal, improving the testing status quo, and what to do about voting alleged PED users to the hall of fame.

Defining Drugs- Isn’t Cortizone a drug? Doesn’t it enhance performance? Why isn’t it deemed a banned performance enhancing drug? Why is it legal but HGH is not? When is HGH legal? There seems to be an awful lot of gray area. Sharper, consistent definitions would benefit everyone. Is it possible to get some kind of marking on supplement labels, like they have for Kosher foods, that indicates that a substance is banned from MLB? That way athletes can’t claim “I’m not a doctor and I didn’t read the label. I figured if it’s available at GNC it would be legal”. Between that ocurring and Mitchell Report-named players claiming they thought HGH was legal since they got it from a doctor, and new supplements sprouting up all the time, keeping up to date with discovering new drugs and alerting the players regarding its legality will have to be improved.

Testing- One resultant of my brainstorming for ideas was this- Is it feasible to catalog hair or urine samples, to retroactively test players after a test is devised? If next week scientists find a way to test for The Clear, other designer steroids or foreign HGH- wouldn’t it be nice to have a stash of Bonds’ hair from 2003, or Sammy’s wiz from 1998? 1998 was a fine vintage year for Sammy’s tinkle from what I understand. Testing really is the key here. If our testing were 100% accurate for 100% of the drugs, we wouldn’t have any more problems with banned substances regardless of how senseless the policies were.

Hall of Fame- Bob Costas suggested adding a modern-era wing to the Hall with a disclaimer saying something to the effect of “a lot of steroids were taken during this era and some records were possibly broken fraudulantly as a result. We aren’t pointing fingers, but just be aware that it happened while these guys were playing”. Should we do that? Should we just trust the writers to police this. since they were appointed to basically be the keepers of the Hall? Should they just disclose drug test results on all of their plaques? Should we presume innoncence until proven guilty per judicial law?

Night #7 of Kwanzaa: Imani. The precept for this last night of Kwanzaa calls upon us to strive to be the best person that we can be so that we can better or community with our improved self. I hope Imani inspires PED users, past and present, not just to come forth and admit their usage, but also to admit truthfully the extent of their usage. While I am very glad a few Mitchell Report-named players have admitted to using HGH, I suspect some are fibbing about the extent of their usage. It is obvious that a lot of steroids were used in the last decade by a lot of players. So when a player admits that he used HGH, but used it only twice, does little good. Sure some small-scale good comes of it- but it does very little “greater good”. I thank the players for admitting their use, but I hope future admitters admit more. What baseball’s drug scandal desperately needs isn’t a sporadic peppering of good- it needs some “greater goods”. Soon preferably.

For a guilty player to admit only to minimal usage is a cop out. That’s like if you were to leave a group of 10 third-graders in a room with 100 cookies and tell them “Ok kids, I’m going to leave the room for an hour. You are not allowed to eat any of the cookies; so when I come back there better be 100 cookies.” Then when you come back you find all the cookies were eaten. When you try to get to the bottom of the issue- if three kids admit to eating only two cookies, that helps, but not much. They know they won’t get punished since, 1) they look more honest than the others at this point, 2) Since they admitted first they know we still have 7 more kids and 94 cookies unaccounted for, so now we’re lead to believe the confessors aren’t the large-scale-cookie-eaters we’re looking for since math dictates that there’s a 10-cookie-eaten-per-kid average. Those minimal-confessors know that since we believe they weren’t the problematic eaters, now the eaters still at-large are presumed to have eaten more, which just ratchets up the intensity of the witch hunt. Until a kid steps up and says “I admit I ate 17 of them. I regret it, but I don’t want to compound the problem by lying about it.”, you aren’t making much progress with your investigation because you haven’t attained much of the greater good.

I find it hard to believe that a player who took HGH only two times, somehow became well-known enough as an HGH user to be named to the Mitchell Report. Look, we know players took steroids. So many of these generation-old records crumbled in the span of a few years. We know it happened. You did it, just come clean. You can right some wrongs, so please just admit it. We know the cookies were eaten, so we won’t get more mad about it upon finding out who ate what. America will forgive you. If McGwire and Bonds gave us full disclosure, it would restore a lot of the respect for them that America lost. If McGwire and Bonds have the courage to cheat America in 1998, and the courage to break Maris’s/Aaron’s record in front of the Maris family/Aaron, and the courage to cash all of those endorsement paychecks that resulted from those record chases, wouldn’t you think they’d then have enough courage to admit that they took performance enhancing drugs? How do P.E.D. users have so much courage for nefarious activity and none for magnanimous activity? Like the adage (and please note: all adages are old so I refrained from the redundant “old adage” which is a pet peeve of mine) “a mistake doesn’t become an error until you refuse to correct it”. We don’t think you’re bad people, just people who made a mistake. So correct it- for the greater good. We will thank you.