January 15, 2008
MLB Execs Defend Anti-Steroid Efforts
Bud Selig, Major League Baseball commissioner, and Donald Fehr, executive director of the MLB Players Association, defended their ability to reduce performance-enhancing drug use in baseball against a threat by Congress to legislate tougher testing.
"Baseball needs to fix these problems, change this culture, alter how it does business with regard to steroids, human growth hormone and all manner of dangerous performance-enhancing drugs, or... Congress will do it for you," House Oversight and Government Reform ranking member Tom Davis, R-Va., said today. The committee was holding its first hearing on a report by former Senate Majority Leader George Mitchell, D-Maine, on the use of drugs in Major League Baseball.
Selig noted that he ordered the Mitchell Report and supports all 20 of its recommendations, some of which he's already imposed, leading to a drop in steroid use in the major and minor leagues. Both Selig and Fehr urged lawmakers to let them address other recommendations through their collective bargaining process.
Mitchell offered support for that position. "I do not believe the report leads to the conclusion that Major League Baseball is incapable of policing itself," he said.
In his report, Mitchell singled out the MLBPA -- the union representing Major League ballplayers -- as having been uncooperative during his investigation, a charge he repeated today. Defending his actions, Fehr called the Mitchell Report a "unilateral action by management" that "in many ways... has taken us off track" after successful negotiations since 2002 to update drug policies. The union has agreed twice to reopen contract negotiations, Fehr said. But it now faces congressional pressure to again renegotiate its agreements with MLB and accept all of Mitchell's recommendations, he said, "against the backdrop of a media extravaganza."
Because the Mitchell Report said many players began using human growth hormone in the face of more rigorous steroid testing, Selig and Fehr urged passage of bills to reduce sales of those and other performance-enhancing drugs. The bills include those sponsored by Rep. Stephen Lynch, D-Mass., and Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., to classify the hormone similarly as anabolic steroids; a measure by Sen. Joseph Biden, D-Del., to stop online sales of performance-enhancing drugs; and legislation by Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, to ban the sale of a natural hormone known as DHEA to minors.
Players may also be adjusting to a ban on amphetamines. Rep. John Tierney, D-Mass., cited MLB data showing the number of players who got exemptions from that ban to take drugs for attention-deficit disorder increased from 28 in 2006 to 100 in 2007, leaving the percentage of Major League players claiming attention-deficit disorder far above that in the general population.
Committee members, few of whom missed chances to question witnesses, appeared sensitive to charges that they are wasting time holding hearings on steroids. Many argued that use by professional athletes causes abuse among teenagers.
"Other issues may be more important, but that doesn't make this inquiry unimportant," Davis said.
Members looked ahead to a February hearing when pitcher Roger Clemens and his former trainer, Brian McNamee, are scheduled to testify under oath. Asked about Clemens' denials of assertions McNamee made to Mitchell that the pitcher used steroids, Mitchell said the trainer faced the threat of prosecution if he lied.
"We believe the statements that were provided to us were truthful," Mitchell said.
At the outset of the hearing, House Oversight and Government Reform Chairman Henry Waxman announced he is asking the Justice Department to investigate whether All-Star shortstop Miguel Tejada lied in a 2005 interview with the committee when he said he never used illegal drugs and had no knowledge of other players using them. The claim by Tejada, whom the Baltimore Orioles recently traded to the Houston Astros, is contradicted by Mitchell's report.
-Dan Friedman, CongressDaily
