TDA Bullpen - Our Writers' Blog

Tuesday, May 17, 2005

Wen Ho Lee and Emmitt Smith

Congress is stirring up the steroids pot. If I was a little more cynical I would suggest that this is because baseball has found more steroid abusers than the US government has found WMDs, and that we don't want things like that one the front page. The latest demand is that baseball does something "real" or else the Feds will step in and impose a two year ban for first time steroids offenders.

Let's turn on the Wayback Machine. Not too long ago I was a graduate student, and a good chunk of my funding came from the Department of Energy. At one point, due to some extreme budget shuffling, I was actually an employee of the Department of Energy. This came with a fancy physical examination, including a drug and alchohol test (since alchohol is legal, I guess the point was to see I was stupid enough to show up at the physical drunk). In any case, a few days before this my advisor asked me "are there going to be any issues with the drug test." Since baseball is my main vice, the answer was no, but it was quite clear that if there was a "problem" it could be swept under the rug without too much trouble. Given the habits of other people I know, I'm guessing a pot violation would be more or less ignored, and harder drugs would be dealt with by some kind of treatment program. I can't imagine a positive drug test would warrant a two year suspension from the Department of Energy for a first time offense. I'm not sure why the general public is so gung-ho about this. If the government came to your boss and said "Hey, start testing everyone and suspend first-timers for two years" I think you would be a little upset. Now I'm sure that some people are saying "the Feds do that to companies in the defense industry all the time", but I'll point out that a good section of DoE is aimed at making mushroom clouds. In fact, to get to my old job I used to drive past a building cryptically known as CP-5, as in the fifth atomic pile built by Fermi (CP stands for "Chicago Pile"). OK, maybe we should make things a little stricter at DoE, right? Well, DoE has had enough witchhunts recently. One Wen Ho Lee is enough.

Meanwhile there has been a huge uproar over records that have been "spoiled" by performance-enchancing drugs. The first thing I would say to this is Pete Rose. He certainly took greenies on his way to passing Cobb. The second thing I'll say is "Thank God for Emmitt Smith." The anecdotal evidence doesn't look good for Sweetness... Walter Payton's durability has long been linked to his amazing workouts, which often put his teammates to shame (sounds like Barry Bonds). He died of a combination of bile duct and liver cancers (don't forget that one of the liver's jobs is clean poisons out of the body). He played in an era where steroid use was rampant in the NFL. Quite frankly, I'd rather believe that Sweetness was clean, but many baseball players have been crucified for much less. At the very least we can say that it's a good bet that some of the men who blocked for Payton were juiced. If we start tossing all the records from baseball's 1990s, should we do the same with football for the '70s and '80s?

posted by David 3:16 PM