View From a Height

Guilt by Association

Bill Rhoden, on this morning's Sports Reporters, went from wrong to dishonest. In his blind defense of Barry Bonds, Rhoden said, among other things, that:

1. Bonds' use of steroids didn't diminish his assessment of Bonds as a ballplayer
   
2. Maybe the other players should have had better chemists
   
3. We don't know for sure that Lyle Alzado and Ken Caminiti died from the effects of steroid use
   

Tom Boswell and Mike Wilbon dispose of point #1 in yesterday's WaPo. And the reason that #2 is illegal is because we do know #3. So much for Mr. Rhoden.

Sports has got a couple of bigger problems. As many writers have noted, baseball's most beloved records have fallen, or are about to fall, not to the heirs of Ruth and DiMaggio, but to the heirs of DuPont and East Germany. (Maybe that's unfair to DuPont.) Even if Bonds goes off the juice tomorrow, he probably still passes Hank Aaron. There's no way of "putting and asterisk," or noting those records were cheap in any meaningful way: the official records still list the 1919 White Sox as the World Series winners.

At the same time, the NBA is dealing with the dark side of the hip-hop culture on a weeklky basis. Entire teams were turned into wholly-owned subsidiaries of Gangland (the Portland Trailblazers, for instance), and now "respect" justifies jettisonning the playground ethic of picking on someone your own size.

Sports needs to reinstate, or expand, its ethic of guilt by association.

After 1919, Judge Landis made not only gambling, but associating with known gamblers, an offense. It got Leo Durocher suspended for a year, even though he had stopped. (As it happens, it got him suspended from managing the 1947 Dodgers, where he probably would have gotten himself killed by cumulative injury defending Robinson.)

Baseball, the NBA, the NFL, need to make associating with known gang members, or known steroid-dispensers, an offense against their respective leagues. Not only won't we tolerate you using drugs, we won't tolerate you hanging around with people who deal them. Or people who shoot other people. Or doctors who have a habit of slipping a little something extra into the exercise shake. They can certainly afford the background checks on their personal trainers.

Mike Wilbon made it clear on PTI the other day that he things Carmelo, a good kid, needs to grow up and get some new friends. Well, it's not just true for Carmelo, it's also true for about 1000 other guys who play professional sports for a living.

I suspect there's no way on God's green earth that the baseball players' union is going to go along with this. And I can't blame Selig for not wanting to pick a fight with a union that wins every one of them. But it certainly would solve the problem, and maybe help some of these young men grow up.