- John Kunich
CHARLOTTE, N.C. — It’s time for the death penalty for baseball’s steroid users. Not literally, but the baseball equivalent — a lifetime ban and permanent ineligibility for the Hall of Fame. The death penalty is for murder, and cheaters are murdering the sport that makes them rich.
Steroids: Lifetime ban and permanent ineligibility for the Hall of Fame
This crime wave’s raged for years as steroid abusers ravaged baseball’s fundamental integrity. Juiced batters exploded with unprecedented power statistics.
Aging, injured pitchers found miracle cures. Good hitters, even late in their careers, artificially reinvented themselves into Babe Ruths. During all the seasons before 1995, players hit 50 or more homers only 18 times, but from 1995 on, it’s happened 23 more — a tsunami of inflated slugging!
Baseball’s most treasured hitting records have fallen, and fallen under a cloud of suspicion. As long-established standards for single season and career homers dissolved in a flood of juice, the entire sport has broken loose from its historical moorings. Baseball has been corrupted by rampant violation of both the criminal law and its internal rules.
My latest book, Cubs Fans’ Leadership Secrets: Learning to Win from a “Cursed” Team’s Errors, proves how a fatal flaw — an Achilles heel — can destroy the greatest talents in baseball and everyday life.
Why do successful standouts, even superstars, become sellouts that cheat to gain added advantage? Call it pride, vanity, or greed, it all spells selfishness. Seductive me-centered impulses tempt people to trample rules and violate the law. Competition is vicious, and some sink to crime for an edge.
When they do, fairness is the first victim and the playing field tilts crooked. Games are won that should have been lost, homers are hit that should have been fly outs, and records shattered that should have endured. Ruined health and early death are the terrible price many abusers — and their imitators, including kids, pay for these “easy” pickings, alongside their honor.
Baseball needs the strongest possible medicine to eradicate this plague. So far, nothing has halted the relentless spread of steroid-fueled travesties. It’s proved ineffective to levy fines against corrupt multi-millionaire players. Go figure.
Suspensions that vanish within weeks haven’t deterred cheaters from resorting to career-making, legend-manufacturing, record-blasting enhancers. Who knew?
The cancer remains, and grows, because our half-hearted attempts to remove it were only cosmetic surgery. We’ve ignored the malignancy and had liposuction.
The All-Star Game is supposed to feature great players with sound character, but in today’s steroid-infested swamp everyone is presumed guilty.
With monitoring and enforcement so lax, who can be certain anyone is clean? Is an amazing power display the result of talent and hard work alone, or a freak-show juiced by lawless abuse? Honest superstars are under the same suspicion as long, ever-growing lists of known cheaters. Without decisive change, fans will soon stop caring, and ballparks will be filled only with ghosts, until baseball becomes a ghost itself.
We’ve been here before. In 1920, as the Black Sox scandal erupted, baseball’s greatest showcase — the World Series — was badly tainted.
If one of the finest teams in history would conspire with gamblers to throw the 1919 World Series, how could anyone trust the game? Why should children become baseball fans if it’s just another fake, scripted, carnival act?
Commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis saw the magnitude of the threat, and resolutely wiped it out. In the process, he wiped out the careers and Hall of Fame chances of famous favorites like Shoeless Joe Jackson, Buck Weaver, and Eddie Cicotte … but he saved baseball.
Baseball needs leadership. It must do what Landis did. Some may be unjustly punished, or punished disproportionate to their crime. But nothing else has worked.
An automatic lifetime ban and Hall of Fame ineligibility for steroid use, established to the Commissioner’s satisfaction, will detoxify and rehabilitate baseball. It’s very strong medicine, but exactly what the situation demands.
John Kunich is Director of Research and a professor of law at Charlotte School of Law in Charlotte North Carolina. He is the author of six books, including Cubs Fans’ Leadership Secrets: Learning to Win from a “Cursed” Team’s Errors (Parkhurst, 2009). Readers may write him at Charlotte School of Law, 2145 Suttle Avenue, Charlotte, NC 28208
