MLB Fastball 08.17.07: Giambi Off The Hook
Posted by Neil Borenstein on 08.17.2007
Jason Giambi is off the hook with commissioner Bud Selig, who had decided not to attempt disciplining Giambi for steroid use after his willingness to speak with Sen. George Mitchell about steroids. Check out my thoughts in this week's edition of MLB Fastball!
Giambi Off The Hook
Selig Not Suspending Slugger
Giambi is off the hook after talking to Sen. Mitchell and doing charitable work.
The decision has been made by Major League Baseball commissioner Bud Selig to not punish Jason Giambi for whatever involvement he may have had with previous use of steroids during his MLB career. Selig's reasoning for not disciplining Giambi stems from both his involvement in charitable work – including a future $50,000 donation to the Partnership for a Drug-Free America – and for the fact that Giambi cooperated with the league's steroid investigator, Sen. George Mitchell, at a time when the Players Association and individual players are highly reluctant to do so.
Giambi previously met with Mitchell about a month ago, which came at the slightly forced request of Selig. Selig had given Giambi a timetable of two weeks to decide whether he would talk to Mitchell about what he knows about steroids and their use in the league. Selig even went so far as to threaten suspension if Giambi did not cooperate.
Giambi has always been one of the popular villains of the steroid era in baseball, first brought to light by Jose Canseco in his book, Juiced. Along with Giambi, Barry Bonds, Gary Sheffield, Mark McGwire, Sammy Sosa and Rafael Palmeiro have all felt the heat from employees involved in baseball and even more so, the fans.
Unlike all of those other players, however, Giambi has been the most open about his history with steroids. He hasn't exactly given a minute-by-minute account for all of his steroid-involved endeavors. However, he also has not tried to plead the fifth like McGwire or shun the media like Bonds. Instead, Giambi has publicly admitted to taking steroids through a leaked grand jury testimony. And, in an interview with USA Today - the same interview that pushed Giambi back into the steroid limelight and prompted Selig to pursue Giambi as a valuable weapon in his campaign against performance enhancing drugs, Giambi regretted using drugs, calling it "that stuff." He also said that everybody in baseball needs to take responsibility for steroids becoming a part of the game and should have taken care of it a long time ago by apologizing and implementing policies to deal with that kind of offense. Essentially, it should have never escalated to this.
Though none of this calls for anybody to look at Giambi as a perfect angel just because he's been the only player to actually work with Selig and the rest of the league in trying to clean the game up, I believe the right decision was made here to basically let Giambi off the hook. He has not all of a sudden turned into a role model since he did technically do wrong by doing steroids even at a time when there were not rules in place to deal with such actions. But it's commendable, regardless, that he has been the only player to date to really recognize his wrongdoings, publicly admit to it and cooperate in an effort to make the game cleaner going forward. His contributions, along with his honesty, should buy him some brownie points and a little bit of leniency from the league and fans in general.
Unfortunately, the backlash from his USA Today confessions were highly negative in nature, despite the fact that he was trying to do the right thing. And I fear popular opinion in Selig's decision to not pursue disciplinary action will receive the same kind of reaction from most fans around the league, those who would much sooner like to watch Giambi literally burn at the stake over watching him hold a "get out of jail free" card.
Much like I said back in May, though, Giambi's efforts here should be met by everybody with some positive reaction.
First, I've made this call out to people before, but name me a point in baseball's history when the game was, well … clean. Everybody wants to go crazy about players cheating for seemingly the past 15-20 years with steroids. But this is just the latest craze of wrongdoing when it comes to baseball.
You have a team that actually dropped a World Series Championship. You have an American icon that was a drunk and a womanizer. You have a player-turned-manager that bet on baseball and spent most of his time denying it.
This isn't to vilify baseball. But it does stand that steroids are hardly the first case of unethical behavior in baseball. And I'm sure the same people that want to criticize Bonds and the gang until the end of time are the same people that think Babe Ruth was some kind of moral authority on how to be an amazing ballplayer and a good person at the same time. Last time I checked, being an alcoholic and sleeping with prostitutes are not things people seek the most when searching for their role models. And it's true that neither of those things can be connected to playing better baseball. However, outside of speculation, it's never really been proven that steroids do either. Just looking bigger doesn't necessarily make you a better athlete, especially when you're already a damn good one to begin with.
So those saying Giambi is a bad man because he did something wrong and should never be forgiven, he becomes just one of many players – a lot of which are icons – that need to be crucified for being just as unethical.
There's also the fact that even if Selig was to pursue a suspension against Giambi, it's not like it would have gone through anyway. Or, at least, it shouldn't have legally.
There weren't any rules around to punish steroid-abusers back when Giambi used them. The policies adopted for handling steroid-users were put into place after this whole epidemic was catalyzed by Canseco's book. You can't hand over a 50-game suspension to a player who did the offense before that 50-game suspension rule was put into place as a punishment for users of steroids on a first time offense. So, while Selig would have had every right to hand down the suspension, Giambi likely would have appealed and should have won that appeal very easily.
With that in mind, I'm sure Giambi wasn't entirely too threatened when Selig brought up the possibility of suspension around the time he wanted Giambi to talk to Mitchell. At that point, Giambi went and talked with Mitchell on his own fruition, perhaps because he felt it was the right thing to do and he wanted to help out in the investigation – again, at a time when nobody else was willing to do the same thing. It requires quite a bit of courage to step away from the rest of the pack and take that stand. He didn't have to do it and likely would've only faced failed attempts at disciplinary action anyway. But he chose to speak with Mitchell anyway; just shortly after coming out and being the most open player accused of steroid use with a major national newspaper.
So those who would like to call for an example to made out of Giambi are really using the wrong player for it. Because all that would do is keep those players with tight lips in such a state, unwilling to divulge what they know and help make an effort to get steroids out of baseball.
I don't particularly care so much about Giambi's charitable work, and that being a reason behind Selig's decision is not very important to me. Many athletes give to charity and they shouldn't escape punishments because of it.
But Giambi's willingness to step forward under intense pressure and extreme negativity shows that he is trying to make an effort in the right direction as an open source for a commission that seemingly has very little power to actually investigate around the league. To give him a suspension after doing what he did would have been a horrible step in the wrong direction for Selig and baseball in general.
And by taking this course of action, Selig may have opened up the lines of communication for more athletes to speak up without fear that they will suffer penalty themselves. After all, the point here shouldn't be about punishing players, but instead about taking the game as it is right now and getting steroids out of it.
Fixing the sport should be the No. 1 priority, not suspending players.
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