Steroids Era Clouds Fehr's Legacy

Had Donald Fehr played the game from which he announced Monday he was walking from after 30 years, we'd marvel at his accomplishments like a 700- or 600-plateau home run hitter during that span or a pitcher who managed 4,500 strikeouts. We'd talk about him like a multiple MVP winner and as being one of the greatest ever at his position or any position. We'd talk about him as a surefire first ballot Hall of Fame inductee.

Then we'd throw it all in the nearest trash bin. We'd chuck it all for the same reasons we do the accomplishments of so many of those sluggers and strikeout artists and MVP winners during Fehr's reign.

Fehr wasn't one of baseball's drug cheats, but as MLB Players Association executive director the past quarter century Fehr aided and abetted those who were cheats -- or who appear to have been -- in what has become the darkest era in baseball since its half century-plus of playing as a segregated game, which was a form of cheating that proved to be unconstitutional.

If Barry Bonds, Alex Rodriguez, Sammy Sosa, Mark McGwire, Jose Canseco, Rafael Palmeiro and Roger Clemens can't go to the Hall of Fame because they've been suspected or indicted for using banned performance-enhancing drugs -- or, better still, have admitted to doing so -- then Fehr shouldn't be thought of so highly either.

The accountants of all the players who played during the Fehr era may disagree given that Fehr boosted the average salary for a Major League Baseball player to $3.3 million this season from $289,000 when he took over the players' union from the legendary labor economist Marvin Miller in 1983. The players may disagree, too, for that same pocketbook reality as well as the one in 1985 when Fehr won three collusion cases for players resulting in the owners paying $280 million in damages.

But it shouldn't be forgotten what former Sen. George Mitchell said upon releasing the Mitchell Report a few years ago: "This has not been an isolated problem involving just a few players or a few clubs. Everyone involved in baseball over the past two decades -- commissioners, club officials, the players association and players -- share to some extent the responsibility for the Steroids Era. There was a collective failure to recognize the problem as it emerged and to deal with it early on."

Fehr led an entire generation of players down that path of ignominy by refusing not only to recognize the problem the Mitchell Report laid bare, but also by refusing to allow his membership to prove otherwise. Thanks to the latter approach, just about all the players of the last 20 years are guilty unless they can prove themselves innocent.



All of us deserve an accusatory finger pointed our way when it comes to baseball's PEDs scandal. The commissioner, Bud Selig, is guilty for not acting quickly or forcefully enough. The owners for whom Selig works are to be blamed for being seduced by the revenue generated by unnatural record-breaking home run chases that some of them let slip they knew was the case. (Said Rangers' owner Tom Hicks two summers ago when asked by a KTVT-TV reporter in Dallas what decisions he regretted since owning the team, he said: "Juan Gonzalez for $24 million after he came off steroids, probably, we just gave that money away.") The fans are guilty for spinning the turnstiles in record numbers to watch baseballs get belted out of bandbox stadiums like they were softballs in a men's industrial league. Media members like me are worthy of being indicted for following the great home run chase of McGwire, Sosa and Bonds and writing mostly glowingly about it, only occasionally raising a doubting hand after hearing of McGwire's andro use or noticing how really big Bonds had gotten on what was supposed to be natural living.

But Fehr ruled over those hundreds of players who ultimately decided to make the last 20 years the Steroids Era. He was the lead wildebeest in the charge over the cliff. When Selig first feebly raised the specter of steroid abuse in the mid '90s it was Fehr who fended it off. When at one of the first Senate committee hearings in Washington, D.C., in 2002, Senators Byron Dorgan (D-ND) and John McCain (R-Ariz) told Selig and Fehr that a strict drug testing program in baseball needed to be negotiated into the labor contract, Fehr responded by telling the senators that lawmakers needed to look into enacting laws to ban over-the-counter sales of PEDs.

In 2008, when Rep. Elijah Cummings (Md.) asked Selig and Fehr at another hearing on PEDs in baseball if they "accept responsibility for this scandal or do you think there was nothing you could do to prevent it?" Fehr responded: "Did we or did I appreciate the depth of the problem? The answer is no. It's a failure that we didn't, and it's a failure that I didn't."

That's two big Fs.

And we won't know for some years to come how exacting the last 20 years or so have been on the long-term health of Fehr's constituents, at least one of whom, Ken Caminiti, an admitted steroids abuser, is dead because of his dalliance with illegally obtained drugs .

At the end of a quarter century of service to baseball players, what Fehr will be remembered for most is the cloud that still hangs over the game, a cloud that he said just this past spring training was gone. It's not, Manny Ramirez reminded us. That's part of Fehr's legacy and it will live a long time.

Kevin B. Blackistone is a panelist on ESPN's Around the Horn, the Shirley Povich Chair in Sports Journalism at the Philip Merrill College of Journalism at the University of Maryland, and a former award-winning sports columnist for The Dallas Morning News. He currently lives in Silver Spring, Md.