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Saturday, Jul 11, 2009
Congress tackles steroids again. Conclusion: They're still bad! Grandstanding? "Perish the thought."
By King Kaufman
Read more: Drugs, Sports, Baseball, Congress, War on Drugs, Bud Selig, Steroids, King Kaufman, Sports Daily
Jan. 16, 2008 | It's good and important that we're able to, of course, but no American should ever have to watch Congress at work. It can be awfully depressing.
Early in Tuesday's hearing of the Oversight and Government Reform Committee into drug use in baseball, carried gavel to gavel on ESPN and C-SPAN 2, Rep. Tom Davis, R-Va., the ranking member, joked about charges that the committee is grandstanding with its periodic forays into the issue of drugs and sports.
"We know some consider this exercise a waste of time," Davis said. "Some even throw a sports metaphor back at us and claim we're only grandstanding. Us? Playing to the crowd? Perish the thought."
But the committee might want to cozy up to that grandstanding idea. Because there were times Tuesday when the only possible conclusions were that the member who had the floor was either grandstanding or just plug stupid.
Christopher Shays, R-Conn., kept asking witnesses why cheating, by which he meant using illegal drugs, should be subject to collective bargaining. He mentioned the Chicago Black Sox scandal, when eight members of the White Sox were kicked out of baseball for throwing the 1919 World Series, noting, "They didn't do anything other than fire them, get rid of them, and send a huge message. So tell me why cheating should be a matter of collective bargaining."
This is a United States representative. Is it possible he doesn't understand how collective bargaining works? Shays made clear in various ways throughout the hearing that he doesn't know the first thing about baseball. He repeatedly referred to Rafael Palmeiro as "Palmeiry," talked about him getting his 300th hit and then, when he corrected himself, or was corrected by an aide, he referred to "Palmeiry" "conducting" his 3,000th hit.
But does he really not understand that workers have rights, that legally recognized bargaining units have a right and a responsibility to negotiate all employment matters on behalf of their members? Is he really unaware that the reason baseball was able to ban the Black Sox is that in 1921, when the ban went into effect, major league players were employed under rules that today would be considered illegal servitude, and that that's no longer the case?
Shays doesn't need to know the ins and outs of the hit-and-run or whether WARP3 is a better stat than Win Shares, but shouldn't he be smarter than a ninth-grader who got a B in civics? And if he's going to talk about the Black Sox, shouldn't he at least know a little bit about the difference between 1921 and 2008?
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