Suspended

I’m on the DL. I’m questionable. I’m on the IR. Whatever you want to call it, I managed to astutely slice open the fingers on my left hand, requiring a trip to urgent care for six stitches and a tetanus shot. I can still type—fortunately—but it’s just not as easy as it normally is.

MLB Commissioner Bud Selig brought up the fact that players who are suspended get to spend time in the minors, re-habbing, if you will, for their return to their major league team. He wanted to eliminate that. Now, I don’t often agree with Bud Selig. I don’t think he does a good job with costumer service—I have no idea how the players feel about him, and have no way of finding out. (They’re probably not going to admit if they hate him, which makes it hard to tell if they’re telling the truth when they say they like him.) However, on this case, I agree.

A player who is suspended does get punished: he doesn’t get paid his salary for the duration of his suspension. And yet, he’s able to get back into game condition from the time he finishes his suspension. He doesn’t come back to the team as if he’s been gone for 50 (or whatever) days. He comes back with his timing down for hitting or his control of his pitches in game situations. With players who make insane salaries, the punishment of pay is less of a punishment as it is a slap. Sure, they miss it, but it’s not like a huge loss to their fortunes, unless they’re been excessively undisciplined in their spending.

I’m well in favor of the suspended player being replaced on the team. (Part of me wonders how much it would affect the teammates if the player either had to be released/exposed to waivers when suspended—or else be left a member of the active roster. I would like to think that players would be more responsible about not taking steroids/abusing drugs because they’d not only hurt themselves, but their teams. However, most guys who behave poorly will still assume they won’t get caught. And I hate the concept of punishing other people for another’s sins.) But I do think that before a player can play in the minors on a suspension-related issue, he should go through the same process as if he had been sent down to the minors: exposed to waivers. This makes it more difficult for the player to get back into the game—which is the exact sort of punishment that’s going to annoy him the most. These guys are competitors. They don’t want to sit on the bench. And if they don’t have the time to get back into game condition in the minors, it will be harder for them to get into games in the majors.

Because of human nature, the odds of stopping steroid abuse are very low (science will keep working on both sides: creating steroids that aren’t detectable, and creating tests to detect them). Thus, it’s likely there will always be players getting caught. There should be a plan to deal with them—the stricter the punishment, the more of a deterrent it will be. But it will never be 100%.