Keegan: Sports on path to eventual ruin

By Tom Keegan     Dec 14, 2007

The idea that a man would walk on the moon seemed as preposterous a century ago as envisioning a world without sports seems today. Just watch, though – sports will end before the world does.

Here’s how: Science, maybe centuries from now, will progress to the point that whatever a man or woman lacks in the way of mental or physical talent can be corrected with a visit to the gene-doping clinic. Don’t like the way the baseballs you hit keep dying at the warning track? No problem. A dose of Barry Bonds gene therapy will correct that. Fastball crawling to the plate? Try some Roger Clemens genes. Go ahead, everyone else is.

Stepford athletes will fill every roster, and everyone will be exactly the same, at once sterile and invincible. At that point, there would be nothing interesting about watching anyone compete in anything.

That day is too far away, too surreal, to stir anybody’s fear, which is unfortunate because steps down that death row have been taken for decades.

Steroids, former Senate Majority Leader George Mitchell told the nation Thursday in verbally summing up his written report, no longer are the performance-enhancing drug of choice for ballplayers. Human growth hormone – one of its side effects is its users tend to bear a facial resemblance to cavemen – has taken its place. HGH has been banned by baseball since 2005, the same way steroids were banned in 1991: toothlessly. Until officials representing baseball owners and players agreed in 2002 to begin testing for steroids, the ban was not enforced. The ban on HGH can’t be enforced now because there is no urine test for it. Major League Baseball hired Dr. Donald Catlin of Los Angeles to try to develop one.

Interviewed in September by the New York Times, Catlin didn’t sound too upbeat.

“It’s about as challenging a project as one can get in the field, but that’s not to say it’s insurmountable,” he told the Times.

Views on the effectiveness of the blood test for HGH vary greatly and for the moment are irrelevant because nobody in baseball seems prepared to cross the line from urine tests to more invasive blood tests.

Catlin has been credited with breaking the code on many designer steroids that until then were not detectable by testing, including the one for which Justin Gatlin was busted for having in his system during the Kansas Relays.

In the world of performance-enhancing drugs, the race between crooks and cops never ends. For each discovery of an effective test there will be some sinister slug born without a conscience introducing into the black market a new undetectable, dangerous shortcut.

Sen. Mitchell did a nice job of avoiding painting an idealistic picture. He made it clear testing isn’t perfect and that his investigation can’t be the last one. He urged MLB to create a department to police chemical cheaters.

Good idea, but if baseball cares about hitting a public-relations home run, it should add a 50-cent surcharge to every ticket sold at a Major League ballpark and use the proceeds to fund steroid testing for high school athletes. Based on last year’s attendance figures, that would raise $39 million.

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