Whoa Now, The Yankees Speak on PED Testing

Mark Feinsand of the Daily News has a great read today about PED testing in baseball. Specifically, the article features commentary by Jason Giambi, Derek Jeter and Mike Mussina about drug testing in the game, and it delves into a variety of issues pertaining to blood tests, urine tests, and the right to privacy (for ballplayers). It’s really a pretty interesting read and to hear players speak up and be so open about it all (including Jeter who’s usually not this way at all) is very refreshing.

The big issue seems to be conducting blood tests. HGH cannot, at this point in time, be screened using urine and it appears as though testing blood is the only way to truly detect its presence in one’s system. Blood tests are considered by many to be invasive and unnecessary, but there are also those who believe, if you have nothing to hide, let’s do it and restore the sanctity of America’s game.

Here’s some text from the article:

“Nobody else, in any facet of business, drug-tests with a blood test - not in the corporate world or anywhere else,” Mussina said. “If they ever find an HGH test that’s a urine test, great. But until we can test for everything, we’re going to be questioned.”

But what if no urine test is developed? Can baseball continue to ignore its HGH problem?

“I’m not taking one side or the other, because I’m not getting into the politics of it and the right to privacy,” Mussina said. “But I don’t think the public opinion of us will ever be cleared up if we aren’t able to test for everything possible. We can’t test for everything possible doing it the way we do it now.”

Meanwhile, baseball has been pushing Don Caitlin, founder of the UCLA Olympic Analytic Laboratory, to develop a urine test for HGH.

Even if the league began using blood tests to screen for HGH, Jeter believes some other drug would emerge that would cause the skepticism over the game’s cleanliness to linger.

“I think it would be a positive, but then they would come up with something else and people would say, ‘They should test for something else,’” Jeter said. “Where does it stop?”

Although Mussina believes that full testing would help the game’s image, he also said that the obsession with naming guilty parties of the past has hindered the sport’s ability to put the issue to rest.

“If we agree to do the most complete and thorough test, then after a certain period of time, people may believe the game is clean,” Mussina said. “The issue now isn’t whether the game is clean from this point forward; everybody is concerned about whether the game has been clean from this point, back 20 years, and who did it.

“We can’t change what happened. We can’t go back, even if we decide that he did it and he did it and he did it. It doesn’t change anything. What are you going to do? Just erase these people from history? You can’t.”

Giambi agrees with Mussina.

“The fans, everybody has to go forward,” Giambi said. “You can’t keep going in the past. Things happened, there wasn’t a testing program and now there is. The game is going in the right direction. There are always going to be skeptics. There’s never going to be a time when everybody is happy.”

Will the scrutiny of the public eventually convince the players to silence their critics once and for all by agreeing to whatever tests are available? Mussina believes that as long as Bud Selig is the commissioner, that will remain a distinct possibility.

“It may come to that,” Mussina said. “It may lag on for five or 10 years. As long as Bud is in office, he’s going to go after every person he can find from 1980/whatever until now. It may drag on for a while, which is too bad. It’s the nature of it.”

There are a lot of subtle nuances and delicate dynamics involved within this situation. Privacy concerns, health concerns, credability issues, union issues, they’re all at work and are central to the steroid debate. As Mussina, a players’ union representative, stated (who is really the star of the report, not Derek Jeter who simply sells more papers) it’s going to take a long time for baseball to figure out its “next move,” especially with its current emphasis on past (a paradox, indeed).