Baseball is a business which sells a product called entertainment. When presented with multi-million dollar contracts, players have an enormous incentive to compete at a top level by any means necessary. We must remember that professional athletes would not have gotten to their position without being very competitive.
And now players who have taken personal health and reputation risks to do so are being thrown under the bus by Major League Baseball. These fallen titans of the game have been ostracized by MLB and its commissioner, Bud Selig.
Of course, we did not see a similar display of outrage when players (who were clearly...agumented) were hitting balls out of parks with eery regularity. Nah, Mr. Selig and MLB were far too busy minting money from fans (who were previously fed-up with MLB after the strike) who wanted to watch the spectacle of superior athletes destroying decades-old records.
Bud and MLB find only the players to blame for the fraud. Of course, this has to be the way, because otherwise we would have to confront the awkward truth that everyone was in on the con. After willfully trashing baseball by turning a blind eye (the same blind eye certain college football coaches display when their college players gain 40 pounds of muscle in 6 months) Baseball is only too happy to let the public think it was all the fault of a few bad apples...that the system of incentives created by baseball had nothing to do with these choices. No, Selig just sat back and counted the money, and when the players lived out their usefulness, they were cast out.
Now that the con is done, everyone in on it walks away with a pile of cash
CEOs of American banks have to answer for the behavior of their traders (who took enormous risks becuase of enormous incentive). Their firms are fined and shareholder suits invariably follow. Ah, but not so Baseball.
Why don't they remit all the profits from the "steroid era" back to the fans?
