Barry Bonds Indicted

MadMax · Nov 16, 2007

DoitDickau said:

Absolutely, but i think there is still an argument to be made that he wasn't "cheating"
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And I think that's just semantics when you don't get voted into the HOF and find your career over while facing prison time with federal prosecutors who carry about a 95% conviction rate.

Major · Nov 16, 2007

DoitDickau said:

Because what he was doing at the time wasn't against the rules of mlb. Kind of hard to cheat when what he was doing wasn't actually against the rules.
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According to this (and granted, it's Richard Justice...), steroids were banned as of 1991. They just weren't tested for.

http://blogs.chron.com/sportsjustice/archives/2006/03/steroids_were_a.html

Baseball players weren't tested for steroids until the spring of 2003. They were against the rules long before that.

In 1991, not long after steroids were declared a controlled substance, then-commissioner Fay Vincent sent the clubs a memo that specifically added steroids to the banned list.

DaDakota · Nov 16, 2007

My guess is that he gets jail time, probably around 1 year.

DD

Buck Turgidson · Nov 17, 2007

Major said:

According to this (and granted, it's Richard Justice...), steroids were banned as of 1991. They just weren't tested for.
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Guess this wasn't as widely reported as it should have been.

BizBall: In the Weds., 11/9 issue of ESPN the Magazine is 16-page examination of the spread of steroid use throughout baseball, and how many of those closely involved with the game were involved. Your name surfaced regarding a memo outlining that baseball had a list of banned substances in the memo sent to all MLB teams, and while baseball could not test for steroids, if a player was caught with steroids, he would be sent for treatment and subject to penalties. What comments do you have on this issue being raised?

Vincent: I don’t remember much about the circumstances and I don’t remember who really pushed for it. But, I can speculate that it came out of an awareness that for people who were not in the union – not protected by the Union agreement – that steroids might be a problem. I think that we had become to realize that there were a variety of other compounds floating around that were dangerous. We’d heard rumors about Jose Canseco. I think we thought that steroids and the like were basically a “football problem”, but we did think that they were dangerous. And so for at least coaches and managers and everybody else in baseball we thought we ought to go on record and say that this is bad stuff and we don’t want it getting a toe-hold in baseball.

I wish I remembered more. Obviously, it wasn’t a major thing because I don’t think any of us thought steroids was really a major issue at the time. We were so wrapped up in cocaine problems, so I just don’t remember that much about it.

I’m sure that what the General Managers are saying is correct that nobody paid too much attention to it because it was aimed at people who probably weren’t big steroid users anyway. I mean the clubhouse man, and the coaches would hardly be taking steroids. But that’s all we could do. We couldn’t do anything with the union because the union wouldn’t even give us a hearing on strengthening the cocaine drug problem laws. I mean, I’m glad I did it (sent the memo), I wished we’d done more.

BizBall: So, on the contents of the memo, was the subject matter of the document broached to the union at the time, or was this a matter of this is an internal thing sent to the clubs, “Please be aware.”

Vincent: I don’t know the answer to that question. I think it would have been highly unusual to raise it with the union because we knew that there was a contract with them there was no way we could do anything in the middle of the contract. And, I think it was really our attempt to be on record, if this was our universe, if we controlled the whole thing, this is what we would do. And we did it, but we did it only for the people that were not covered by the Collective Bargaining Agreement.
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copy of memo: http://www.bizofbaseball.com/docs/1991Memo_Baseballs_Drug_Policy_And_Prevention_Program.pdf

from: http://www.bizofbaseball.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=1173&Itemid=81

DoitDickau · Nov 17, 2007

Buck Turgidson said:

Guess this wasn't as widely reported as it should have been.

copy of memo: http://www.bizofbaseball.com/docs/1991Memo_Baseballs_Drug_Policy_And_Prevention_Program.pdf

from: http://www.bizofbaseball.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=1173&Itemid=81
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Major and Buck,
Thanks for the links. I never knew that.

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