A Radical Solution to Baseball’s Steroid Crisis?

Jim Bouton was a pitcher for the New York Yankees during the 1960s who wrote the controversial mega-best seller Ball Four in 1970, and was instrumental in the rise of the Major League Baseball Players’ Association. I’ve always admired Bouton (pictured with Mickey Mantle), and I interviewed him for a business magazine I was working for when I was in my early 20s. 

Bouton, ever the iconoclast, has come up with a radical solution to end baseball’s steroid/human growth hormone crisis. As a general rule I sympathize with the players’ union, but I think they have largely missed the boat on this issue so far.

As Bouton explains, the most important thing is not to protect the rights of players who have used steroids or are accused of it–the most important thing is to protect the players who don’t use steroids or HGH, and who suffer a competitive disadvantage because of it.

In a recent Village Voice interview, Bouton says:

“They’ll probably come up with some halfway measure that doesn’t really do the job, or they’ll come up and they’ll say, ‘Now you can’t take human growth hormones [HGH] and you can’t take steroids anymore.’ But then some chemist will come up with something next month, next year, two years from now, some other performance enhancing procedure or drug.

“That’s why what baseball needs to do, what all the major sports need to do, is take blood tests of these guys now and tell them they’re going to save the blood tests. And if it turns out down the road that there’s any performance enhancing drugs that currently exist or are created in the future you’re going to be responsible for having taken those drugs, even though we have no rules against them. Otherwise this is just a race against the chemists, who are going to come up with masking devices. But if you’ve got the blood and you’re holding on to it, that’s going to serve as the baseline for future tests.”

The full interview is Interview: Jim Bouton on the Mitchell Report (Village Voice, 12/14/07).

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