Cycling Ain't Baseball

Wow!  Baseball is certainly tolerant of their cheaters; the Alex Rodriguez arbitration decision is final: a 161 game suspension, or one season, for the second known doping offense.  Of course, Alex Rodriguez will lose twenty-one million dollars in salary for one year; but unlike cycling, the Yankees still have three years left on his contract to pay, even if Alex Rodriguez never appears again at-bat.

Yes, if it were only so simple.  The Yankees hate "A-Roid".  The Yankees wish "A-Roid" would vanish from baseball forever.  But "A-Roid", like all good cheaters feels that he has been a victim of a vendetta; after all he uses the same logic as any other doper; there were no positive tests and Bud Selig wants to make him a scapegoat.  Of course Alex Rodriguez is innocent, the cash payments that were recorded at Biogenesis of America were incorrectly attributed to the wrong Alex Rodriguez, and the human growth hormone and other prohibited performance-enhancing substances Anthony Bosch injected into Alex Rodriguez were nothing more than inert saline solution.

There is also a further complication: Alex Rodriguez wants to contest the arbitration award in Federal Court as an unfair process that denies due process and other legal protections to the defendant.  Ice will freeze in hell before any Federal Court will side with Mr. Rodriguez.  The only winners will be the shyster lawyers who will reap incredible fees for service.  Listen, Mr. Rodriguez, these cases are always dismissed.

If Alex Rodriguez was a cyclist his career would be over for eight years for a second doping offense.  Under the archaic rules of cycling, the Yankees could fire Alex Rodriguez even if he had a multi-year contract.  His case would be considered a "personal affair" between himself and the anti-doping agency that was responsible for prosecuting him, even if the team ran an organized doping program.

For example, Floyd Landis, supposedly asked Andy Rihs, owner of BMC bicycles to run an organized doping program similar in scope to the organized doping program Lance Armstrong used with the United States Postal Service Professional Cycling Team, or so Floyd Landis claims.  If this fact is true,(and given Floyd Landis's track record of flip-flop inventiveness over the years, this is a very big if) then Andy Rihs should have been charged along with Floyd Landis. There should have been an investigation of Team Phonak, and if any wrongdoing could have been discovered, then the whole bunch should have been charged with doping violations and chucked out into the street.  To say that an organized doping program did not exist on Team Phonak before Floyd Landis arrived would be misguided lunacy.  Tyler Hamilton was a chronic Phonak doper who took substance abuse to extreme levels.  Phonak had so many riders who tested positive for performance-enhancing drugs that the UCI felt obliged to pull Phonak's Pro Tour license.  The license was only restored after Phonak put on a show of cleaning up the team through a bogus internal team biological passport that turned out to be nothing more than developing a methodology to beat the WADA labs.  But, when Floyd Landis tested positive for synthetic testosterone, Phonak described the situation as a "personal affair," that had nothing whatever to do with Phonak.  See the deception in all of this?  Of course, nobody is accusing the Yankees baseball team of running an organized doping program that included the Biogenesis of America.

Never trust any team, cycling or baseball that carries around a mandate against doping, a blood centrifuge, or blood diagnostic equipment.  Or the name Garmin or Sky.  Stated intentions are never what they appear to be; there always seems to be an underlying current of deception lurking somewhere right below the pristine surface: follow the money!

Of course, baseball could ban players for eight years for a second doping offense instead of for 161 games, then people could be rid of these repeat offenders -- like they rid the world of Lance Armstrong!  Eight years is like a lifetime ban.  But then again, baseball can continue the charade and pay men who dope millions of dollars under binding contracts at the insistence of the players union.  Everybody is saying that Alex Rodriguez wanted to be the first player to hit 800 home runs; just like Lance Armstrong wanted to be the first man to win seven Tour de France titles.  The punishment should be commensurate with the crime after all.

Alex Rodriguez will serve his suspension and the Yankees will probably eat his contract and farm him out to some baseball team in Siberia.  But it is time for baseball to rethink the problem and re-structure the contracts.  Otherwise teams will continue to be stuck with deadwood and the remaining players who have not yet been caught will never be incentivized to quit.