The apology baseball needs

Politics once again intruded on sports this week -- or maybe it was the other way around -- when Alex Rodriguez admitted he used steroids from 2001 to 2003.

Rodriguez's apology promptly followed, though it did not precede, a Sports Illustrated report that an anonymous source leaked information indicating the Yankees star tested positive for steroids five years ago. His comments, which took place in an interview with the dean of baseball writers, Peter Gammons, immediately touched off a flood of sports and political pundits, athletes, coaches, ESPN legal analysts, and others, all parsing Rodriguez's admission.

Baseball commissioner Bud Selig indicated that A-Rod's admission might not be enough, growling about the possibility of punishing Rodriguez for his use of performance-enhancing substances. The matter even came up at the White House press conference, with Barack Obama saying the news "tarnishes an entire era."

The pursuit of sorry-sorryness

Notably lacking in much of the discussion, at least until this week, has been much in the way of broader analysis, and, frankly, broader apologizing. Rodriguez was outed, said he was sorry, and was thenceforth inspected and dissected. But who else has played a role in the steroid scandal, which has grown for a decade? Who has played a role as a supplier, enabler, facilitator, and, if you will, money launderer?

Here is a partial list of who in the baseball world is in a sorry state -- or at least, ought to be -- and what they, indeed we, ought to be apologizing for.

JOSE CANSECO. Canseco is the former Oakland A's star who admitted his own steroid use and began blowing the whistle on steroids in his 2005 book, Juiced. Actually, Canseco is one of the few people in America who probably owes no apology at all. Indeed, he is owed one.

Yes, he's self-promoting -- but after the trashing he's taken from some, he has every right to be. Some -- including Rodriguez himself -- say he's been fast and loose with the facts. So far, however, he has been vindicated, and while some say Canseco might be lying, we know for a fact that most of the people he's accused do. If politicians, baseball fans, and others are looking for a hero in this scandal, it is Canseco -- who is hereby nominated not only for the Baseball Hall of Fame, but a Pulitzer Prize.

THE PLAYERS UNION. Everyone knows that the players union has been a major stumbling block working against meaningful restrictions on steroids. Then again, like a defense attorney doing his job, the union was representing the perceived interests of its clients.

All that is in the past, though. The much larger problem will lie in the union's apparent determination to continue keeping things quiet -- and especially, to protect the names of the other 103 players who reportedly tested positive during the 2003 test. The test was, it should be pointed out, conducted under the promise of anonymity, precisely so that baseball could estimate the extent of the steroid problem in a non-recriminatory environment.

Today, the union is misrepresenting-representing its client in two ways. First, it denies the vast majority of players, who were clean, the opportunity to have at least one indication of their innocence on the record, magnifying whatever their achievements were by showing they were achieved, at least in 2003, without steroids.

Second, and more important, the union will be playing, once again, the role of foot-dragger and grudging conceder, rather than getting out in front and helping to get out the facts and solve the problem. Is there anyone who thinks that, in modern day America, a list of more than 100 famous people who used steroids -- a list that has now passed between the union, the government, and who knows how many other persons? -- will remain secret.

If the union encouraged the players to voluntarily release the results of the 2003 test, it would be getting the players out in front. It would get the bad news out of the way -- giving the press, as Jack Ryan put it in the movie Clear and Present Danger, "nowhere to go -- nothing further to report." It would also deflect the blame from those who used steroids by demonstrating the pervasiveness of the problem -- and their good faith and commitment to reform, by the act of making an unforced admission.

Instead, the union is encouraging the players to stick with the strategy it and they have followed for ten years. This guarantees the steroid story will be in the headlines for years to come, in dribs and drabs -- yesterday, Roger Clemens, today, Miguel Tejada. For this, the union owes an apology not only to baseball fans, but to the players themselves.

SENATOR GEORGE MITCHELL. Senator Mitchell did what he was hired to do, filing a report on steroid use in baseball that focused almost completely on the players' side of the equation, with little or no scrutiny of the owners and managers, or the commissioner.

Senator Mitchell, like the union, was representing his client's interests -- but in determining how to define those interests, he wound up serving his client poorly. He should have insisted on being allowed to look at the whole steroid scandal -- at how a culture of enabling, abetted by economic interests, emerged and thrived. Instead, like Colin Powell before the United Nations, he did what his boss, unwisely, told him to do. Senator Mitchell ought to apologize for looking at a sorry state of affairs, doing a sorry investigation of it, and issuing a sorry report.

SPORTSWRITERS. As in so many scandals, sportswriters have allowed themselves to be led around by the nose, chasing one side of the story because it's what's getting leaked. For every tough question or report they've issued on the baseball owners and Commissioner Selig, they've issued 10,000 on the latest titillating micro-story fed them by this self-interested source or that official report. Sports journalists have spent bucket loads of dollars investigating Barry Bonds, Roger Clemens, and A-Rod. By contrast, the resources committed to scrutinizing Mitchell, Selig, the owners, and others have come out of the 7-11 penny tray.

In recent days, some of the better journalists have at least begun to recognize this. It's a partial apology. But a better one would be if ESPN, The New York Times, and others put their money where their anti-steroid mouth is, and started doing some real reporting.

THE OWNERS and BUD SELIG. Commissioner Selig raised an interesting point this week -- that Rodriguez's use of steroids, while it violated no rule of baseball in force at the time, may well have been a criminal act. This may be true -- but it is not necessarily a path that Selig should want to travel.

In the law, at least in my informed-layman's understanding of it, a conspiracy is formed whenever two or more people form an intent to carry out a criminal purpose, reach an agreement on it, and then, take some positive act to put the agreement in motion.

Members of the conspiracy, once formed, can be guilty of all sorts of criminal acts, even if they played no role in the act itself, even if they didn't know about a particular act -- provided it was part of some larger design. (And the agreement itself can be tacit, spoken in code and body language -- as in, say, a labor negotiation.) A money launderer who is part of a drug ring may be culpable for the smuggling, robberies, and murders committed by members of the ring, provided he was playing his tacit role in a larger machine.

Under conspiracy law, plenty of people have gone to jail for willful ignorance -- such as attempting to smuggle a package they did not "know" contained drugs. In one famous case, a man was convicted of ongoing conspiracy to evade taxes even though he was in prison when the tax evasion was committed by someone else. Conspirators can also be guilty for efforts to evade detection by members of the conspiracy. Hmmm.

No, it is not Rodriguez or Clemens or Bonds who owe the largest apology, but the owners themselves, the willfully ignorant enablers of the Steroid Era. Whether they should also be apologizing, and explaining themselves, under oath, is open to legal argument. That they have not been placed in the dock, even the dock of public opinion, is what's truly criminal.

THE FANS. Lest we all let ourselves off the hook, baseball fans themselves owe an apology to -- well, to whomever, but we ought to be sorry. The baseball fan, like many Americans today in the field of politics, is a whiny, blame-shifting, civic-ally passive animal. We criticize the Bush-Obama bailout of mismanaged banks, but we do not march on Washington. We grouse about drugs in sports -- but flock to attend or view the games on television in ever-increasing numbers.

But if we fans are sorry, even it's only to ourselves and to our children, we should express it by taking action.

1. Fans should flood Mr. Selig's office, ESPN, the players union, and the baseball owners with a demand that all the parties in the steroid debacle come forward with all the facts. Fans who have it in them to boycott a few games should do so. Those who can't should attend only while wearing a Bud Selig mask stamped with the words "Take responsibility, Bud."

These and other protests and pleas should be done not in a spirit of recrimination, but one of hope and reform. If the owners, players, and sportswriters do their job, they should not be repaid for their courage by being blackballed from the Hall of Fame, trashed in the press, or scorned by fans. What baseball fans really want is the truth, and then to move on.

2. In fact, rather than relying on the idiots who rule sports, fans should form their own blue-ribbon commission to perform a real investigation of the steroids mess, and suggest solutions. It is hereby formed, along with a request to the union, the owners, the players, and the politicians that they cooperate fully in the effort.

The commission, to be co-chaired by Chris Berman, Ralph Nader, Jack Kemp, or some similar combination, would be an effort of the fans, by the fans, and for baseball itself. Anyone who loves the game is welcome. Joe Morgan, Pat Summit, Jim Rome, Jesse Jackson, Amy Trask, Senator Jim Bunning, Sandra Day O'Connor, Peter Gammons, Deion Sanders, Anne Levinson -- and most important, season ticket holders, stadium vendors, and whoever designed that Jim Beam commercial -- call your office.

The Fans Commission on Baseball should find out the truth -- how competitive forces, slack morality, lazy press coverage, poor management, and the presence of billions of dollars, always a dangerous combination, led us into this mess. But it should do so in a non-prosecutorial spirit.

It will then have a moral warrant to suggest, without imposing, a set of solutions. What to do about baseball records set during the steroid era. How Hall of Fame voters should deal -- strictly as a matter of advice and encouragement -- with players from the steroid era, and that must now include not only the users, but the non-users.

And, of course, how baseball should deal with steroids and other drugs in the future, in a dynamic environment of constant innovation in both testing, and the means of circumventing it. (Players and owners and advertisers: How about some donations to medical research on the testing side?)

Perhaps the Fan Commission will propose, or itself become, a kind of independent oversight body for such matters. Everyone in baseball owes somebody an apology. But after a decade of steroid eruptions, and another such decade to come, it is time to set things right. Failure to do that -- now that would be truly sorry.

(Gregory Fossedal has written on politics since 1977 for such publications as The New York Times, Reader's Digest, Commentary, The New Republic, and more than 200 newspapers. He has advised numerous politicians, athletes, and politicians on policy and public affairs, and is the author of such books as Direct Democracy in Switzerland, Our Finest Hour, and The Democratic Imperative.)

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