Are the Feds now making mlb into a victim?

Thanks, Cran.

 

THOSE KIDS are being compelled to take drug tests. If you play high school sports in a state with testing, you are going to submit to a random drug test for PEDs and other illegal drugs.

Quitting the team to avoid taking a test seems to satisfy the point of the testing, doesn't it?

 

Which is why I suspect that - whatever the constitutional or contractual niceties - when push comes to shove, MLB will simply say "For the good of the game, and in the best interests of baseball, we intend to cooperate completely with any Federal investigation into the use of illegal performance enhancers."

The league has never wanted to handle this. Never. Given which way the wind has been blowing lately, they've simply subcontracted the investigations to a more-than-willing partner.

 

http://www.denverpost.com/news/ci_9289644

An estimated 4,155 schools across the country test urine, saliva, hair and even blood of students involved in extracurricular competitive activities — covering students in everything from 4-H to football to the debate team.

Why should my participation in the 4-H Club be contingent on my willingness to submit to a drug test administered without probable cause?

 

You must have something to hide.

 

Depending on the job, I could see why a company would require someone to take a drug test. I wouldn't want a surgeon on cocaine to operate on me.

Taking a test to participate in the 4-H Club smacks of Big Brotherness. It's a volunteer organization.

 

Frankly, Buck, in my opinion there isn't a difference. That so many companies have for so long coerced prospective employees not just into drug testing, but into polygraph tests as well, speaks to the point that F_B is trying to make. We've willingly helped erode our own rights.

Make whatever arguments you can about private companies making decisions in their own best interests; or in the spirit of workplace safety or theft-prevention, but the practice stinks.

 

From a legal and public standpoint, I'm pretty sure MLB has been in opposition to the feds on this aspect from the beginning. Remember, these test results were seized in April 2004, so this case has been going on for four years now. This is all pre-Mitchell Report.

Bud Selig and some of the owners may privately wish that they lose the case and all the results become public but MLB's labor lawyers are fighting it.

 

It made sense for MLB to fight this tenaciously prior to the Mitchell Report - because it would have revealed what MLB most wanted to ignore, the breadth and extent of PEDs in baseball. Now that the cat's long out of the bag, however, I suspect MLB's survival instincts turn to cooperation and compliance. They'll play out the string, certainly, by arguing that the Feds are violating all sorts of confidentiality apparatus, but what MLB wants most, I'd guess, is that the responsibility and oversight for all this be lifted from them. At least until it's off the front page.