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September 28, 2005

Three Strikes and You're...Given a Fourth Strike

The Players Association Responds

by Thomas Gorman

On Monday, MLBPA Executive Director Don Fehr publicly responded to Commissioner Selig's call for a more stringent testing and discipline regime to combat the use of Performance Enhancing Drugs (PEDs) in Major League Baseball. The compromise suggested by Fehr, and the earlier proposal for a stricter program by the Commissioner, still disagree on crucial points.

The Commissioner's proposal was made in a publicly-released April 25th letter to Don Fehr. In that letter Selig suggested five substantive changes to the current Joint Drug Agreement (hereafter called the Agreement for brevity's sake), agreed to in January of 2005.

1. The Commissioner proposed that punishments increase to 50 games, 100 games, and a lifetime ban for first, second and third offenses from the previous schedule of 10 games, 30 games, 60 games, and one year for first, second, third, and fourth offenses.

   Note that under the current regime a lifetime ban for a fifth offense is not enshrined in the language of the Agreement, but is instead understood to emanate from the Commissioner's authority to "impose discipline consistent with the notions of just cause" and to impose penalties for further positive tests "according to the principles of progressive discipline"; Rob Manfred, MLB's Executive Vice President for Labor Relations & Human Resources confirmed this understanding in public comments to the media on January 13th.

2. The Commissioner proposed the re-categorization of amphetamines from "drugs of abuse" (like cocaine and marijuana) to "performance enhancing drugs." Such a re-categorization would make a positive amphetamine test result no different from a positive result for any other PED as far as the punishment is concerned. Under the current system positive tests for "drugs of abuse" put a player into a "Clinical Track" counseling program.

   But more critically, under the current policy, a person only gets dropped into the counseling program if they are somehow publically shown to have used a Drug of Abuse (e.g., getting arrested for possession). In some cases the Health Policy Advisory Committee (HPAC) can compel testing with just cause, but that is extraordinarily rare. By shifting the drug to the PED category it would be regularly tested for with random urinalysis of every player.

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