Ken Davidoff

Ken Davidoff

MLB

Players’ anger driving push for harsher PED penalties

This week’s Pop Quiz question came from Herb Heins of Clifton Park, NY: Name the former Diamondbacks player whose father acted in the TV series “JAG.”

So Jhonny Peralta is a Cardinal, and if you’re a Mets fan, go ahead and be disturbed that your team was outbid for one of its top targets. Of course, common sense says, given the recent fortunes of the Cardinals and Mets, the Mets would have needed to dramatically outbid St. Louis just to have a chance.

Right now, though, I want to focus on another component to this Peralta story: The Twitter noise by players — OK, it’s just two players: former Yankee and Met David Aardsma and Diamondbacks reliever Brad Ziegler — reacting to Peralta’s four-year, $53-million contract.

First, for the hard news: Ziegler, the Diamondbacks’ player representative, tweeted (among other thoughts): “People really don’t understand how this works. We thought 50 games would be a deterrent. Obviously it’s not. So we are working on it again.”

So yeah, I’d expect baseball’s Joint Drug Agreement to be revised this winter to toughen the penalties. Maybe it’ll just be two strikes and you’re out – 100 games and then lifetime suspension. Maybe something else. But the momentum has been building really since the Biogenesis story broke in January — since we were (not in the least) shocked to realize players still were looking for ways to use illegal performance-enhancing drugs — for the deterrents to be more, well, deterring.

Second, let’s go with the obvious social observation: In Bud Selig’s time as commissioner, baseball has expanded its playoffs twice, introduced interleague play, witnessed another revenue/salary explosion, benefited from the statistical-analysis revolution, seen radical changes in defense strategies (a la the shifts), initiated the World Baseball Classic, overseen the rise of MLB.com and the MLB Network (which has allowed the league to control its message far more than in the past) and watched players join Twitter.

But I’m not sure there’s a bigger, more meaningful change than how the PED issue has changed the player-owner dynamic. The notion of “Players vs. Owners” seems quaint now, the relic of a simpler time. Now, it’s all about Players vs. Players. It’s about guys like Aardsma and Ziegler, neither of whom is accomplished enough to have qualified for an All-Star Game, feeling comfortable enough to publicly go after a player like Peralta who has done more in the game. And knowing, surely, they won’t face any real ramifications for their outspokenness.

The owners and the commissioner’s office used to drive the drug policy. Now they largely can sit back and watch the players duke it out as the union drives the policy into tougher realms. It’s like “The Simpsons” episode when Bart becomes a hall monitor.

Third, let’s question the logic and timing of Aardsma’s and Ziegler’s observations. Peralta was busted in August on the non-analytical positive of Anthony Bosch’s evidence against him; Peralta never failed a drug test. Biogenesis closed before the 2013 season, yet Peralta put up a very solid year with the Tigers until he got slapped with his 50-game suspension on Aug. 5 and he hit well in the postseason upon his return. So Peralta succeeded in 2013 either without any illegal help or with help from somewhere else while passing his drug tests — and he did all this under the pressure of knowing that trouble loomed for him and then, in the playoffs, knowing that his work would be highly scrutinized.

Therefore it’s not like Peralta injected himself, hit great, got caught and — boom — payday. It’s more nuanced than that. This was a perfectly reasonable investment for the Cardinals, who might lead MLB in perfect reasonableness.

Fourth, let’s address the emotions behind these sentiments. You have to know what you don’t know in life, and I admit, as an outsider, I can’t fully appreciate how much it would bother me if I were a player who didn’t want to take illegal PEDs — didn’t want to expend the money, time and risks (both of getting caught and of damage to my body) required to pull this off — and there were still players doing so, impacting the playing field and the game’s finances.

But what exactly do these players want? The Joint Drug Agreement lays out the discipline, and like virtually any doctrine of law, the idea is you serve your time and then you move on. There’s nothing in the JDA about a player being limited in his next contract or about him being branded so negatively that no team will touch him ever again.
Unless you sign onto a one-and-done disciplinary code — lifetime suspension with one offense — you’re never going to control the post-suspension narrative. And I don’t see a one-and-done ever happening.

These players’ anger is understandable, and it will have impact. Now I just wonder if we’ll ever see a time in baseball when the players are satisfied with their own illegal PED discipline. Because there will be zero shock, no snarky parentheses necessary, if and when the next illegal PED scandal occurs.

Your Pop Quiz answer is Conor Jackson, whose father John M. Jackson was a regular in “JAG.” If you have a tidbit that correlates baseball with popular culture, please send me an email.