I’ve heard it said many times that dopers will outthink any testing, but why make it easy on them? Why not adopt the highest standards in testing to ensure that all positives are truly positives, thereby generating credibility? Then become extremely proactive in developing new tests for new drugs, devise new standards for random and non random testing. Devote yourselves to it as if the life of your sport depends on it. Because in fact, it does.

As much as a I hate to say it, Barry Bonds has to be judged not vs players of distant decades who we can be sure didn’t use steroids but vs his contemporaries, many of whom did use steroids. Since there wasn’t testing until the past few years, we should just assume that most players during Barry’s prime years were using. Compared to them, his performance was still exceptional to the point of being all time great. There’s plenty enough circumstantial evidence to say Bonds did knowingly use steroids.

Aside from Rafael Palmeiro and a bunch of minor league pitchers, there haven’t been many players busted for steroids use since testing started. This surely is not because nobody is using them. Baseball needs to consider adding some non-randomness to the testing. Say, automatically test players who are in the top 10 in HRs or strikeouts every month.

Very good post. I agree. Dick Pound is a lunatic. But maybe the fact is, there is no way to keep these sports clean. The rewards are so enormous for winning–whether it’s the Tour de France or hitting home runs–that the incentives for cheating are too great. But it seems to me that the affect of steroids on a sport like cycling is much greater than baseball. Steroids actually affect your phsycial ability to cycle fster and longer, while the affect on hitting a baseball seems more indirect to me.

But the fact is, professional teams and athletes have always been willing to do whatever it takes to win (and thereby make more money). In the fifties and sixties that meant taking greenies in baseball and I’m sure football players took stuff too. Unless fans stop going to games in response to cheating–highly unlikely–that’s not going to change.

I heartily dislike Bonds for a lot of reasons but this hand-wringing over him “cheating” and disgracing the record books seems like a lot of crocadile tears. Players have cheated for year–but some cheating, such as throwing spitters, is considered colorful, while other cheating, such as using corked bats, is considered beyond the pale. I don’t think all cheating is of the same nature–steroids is worse because of the physcial danger invovled–but it’s naive to think that players won’t do whatever is necessary to win.