Baseball union chief clever, pathetic in Senate hearing
They ganged up on baseball union boss Donald Fehr in Congress, and he didn’t flinch.
Republican and Democratic senators, the nation’s anti-doping chief, the baseball and football commissioners, even the NFL’s union leader were arrayed against him at a hearing on steroids in sports.
Even pale and weak from recent surgery, Fehr nimbly tap-danced around the senators’ challenges, brushed aside his football brethren, and jabbed back with an air of arrogance. He had his gallbladder removed, but he still had his gall.
It was the kind of show that just might spur Congress to enact long-overdue doping legislation.
Everyone courteously wished Fehr good health, but he and an angry Senate Commerce Committee traded shots for more than two hours Wednesday over steroid use by ballplayers.
Congress was to blame, Fehr said pointedly and accurately, for the 1994 law that allowed androstenedione and other steroid precursors to be sold over the counter. It’s up to Congress, not baseball, to change the law and to ensure that supplements are safe, he argued.
He defended players’ privacy rights regarding random, year-round drug testing, dipping into dubious claims of protection under the Fourth Amendment. Any testing in a business such as major league baseball, he said, must be negotiated between labor and management.
It was artful and clever.
It was also pathetic.
There is something noble about a man who stands on principle, claiming the high ground against uncouth invasions of privacy or violations of rights.
There is something phony about it when the issue is used as a bargaining chip, hurts the athletes he represents and the youngsters they inspire, and compromises the essential integrity of the so-called national pastime.
What came through in all of Fehr’s answers was the sheer contempt for control of a union leader far out of step with the rest of the sports world.
This would be a perfect time for Fehr to step down from his post. Instead, he may sign up as union boss for three more years so he can negotiate the next contract.
Sen. Joseph Biden spoke with outrage about the baseball union’s reluctance to embrace tighter drug-testing rules and stronger punishment for violators, saying that the sport had a “legitimacy problem” and that “the union’s wrong here.” Further, he said, there is something “un-American” about cheating with steroids.
That was a curious term, especially after Chicago Cubs manager Dusty Baker recently referred to the atmosphere of steroid suspicions surrounding ballplayers as reminiscent of McCarthyism. For those unfamiliar with that sad chapter in history, the 1940s and ’50s Communist hunt led by Sen. Joseph McCarthy and the House Un-American Activities Committee unfairly wrecked a lot of reputations.
Baker lamented that innocent ballplayers might be smeared by suspicions that they were juicing up, simply because they were clients of a lab that allegedly made steroids or came to training camp this year looking lighter as drug-testing began.
Well, that’s not exactly a stretch.
Suspicions abound in baseball precisely because of the union’s stand and the owners’ inability to enforce strict testing despite a decade of ballooning muscles and home run records.
Fehr was the only man in the Senate hearing room who didn’t seem to perceive the danger that steroids and over-the-counter steroid precursors pose to sports, athletes and fans.
He was the only man testifying on his side of the panel — he sat next to baseball commissioner Bud Selig, down the table from U.S. Anti-Doping Agency CEO Terry Madden, and NFL union chief Gene Upshaw and commissioner Paul Tagliabue — to reject year-round random testing.
Upshaw said NFL players are less worried about invasions of privacy than they are about their health and giving an edge to cheaters.
Tagliabue and Upshaw spoke as one about the problem and how to deal with it. Selig and Fehr spoke as veterans of labor battles, still on different sides of the drug issue.
Selig urged stricter tests, such as the ones used in minor league baseball. Fehr reiterated the union’s opposition to stringent testing of a whole class of people, such as major leaguers, rather than only individuals suspected of using steroids.
There’s no certainty that all the testimony and threats will amount to anything more than rhetoric.
Sen. John McCain, the Commerce Committee chairman, told Fehr that Congress will step in unless the union agrees to toughen the sport’s steroid-testing rules.
“Your failure to commit to addressing this issue straight on and immediately will motivate this committee to search for legislative remedies,” warned McCain, an Arizona Republican.
“I don’t know what they are. But I can tell you, and the players you represent, the status quo is not acceptable. And we will have to act in some way unless the major league players’ union acts in the affirmative and rapid fashion.”
Fehr simply stared back as if daring McCain to try.
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Steve Wilstein is a national sports columnist for The Associated Press. Write to him at swilstein(at)ap.org