The class character of the steroids issue

By Mike Gimbel

The following remarks were made at a Feb. 20 Workers World Party meeting in New York City. Gimbel is a former baseball consultant for the Boston Red Sox and Montreal Expos.

Marxists cannot ignore the fact that under capitalism, anti-drug wars are police measures meant to intimidate the working class. The steroid issue is just the sports version of the drug wars that have jailed so many poor people.

Taking “supplements” of various sorts had been considered an accepted part of sports for millennia. When industrial capitalism was on the rise in the 1800s, it developed the sciences of chemistry and modern medicine. The new chemical and medical knowledge was available to all industries, including the newly developing sports industry. Athletes were encouraged to use these new chemical products. Some of these concoctions were useful, but most were sold by snake oil salesmen as “magic bullets” that would guarantee victory.

Prior to steroids, there were amphetamines. It wasn’t considered cheating to use them, even though amphetamines often have a greater impact on performance than steroids. The use of steroids is a medical issue only. There is nothing wrong with trying to improve your performance in sports, provided that it is done under medical supervision that will protect the athlete from taking unnecessary health risks.

Dr. Norman Fost states, “It is hypocritical for leaders in major league baseball to trumpet their concern about fair competition in a league that allows one team (the Yankees) to have a payroll three times larger than most of its competitors.

“A particularly egregious example of this hypocrisy was the juxtaposition in the 1988 Olympics of Ben Johnson and Janet Evans. Johnson broke the world record for the 100-meter dash and not only had his gold medal taken away but became the permanent poster child for the immorality of steroids, which, though illegal, were available to virtually anyone who wanted them. Evans, after winning her medal in swimming, bragged about the key role of her greasy swimsuit, which the Americans had kept secret from their competitors, and went on a prolonged lecture tour as ‘America’s Sweetheart.’”

What are the facts about steroids? There is no scientific definition for “performance enhancement.” There is no scientific proof that anabolic steroids improve the performance of baseball players. Steroids are a serious health risk only if they are used by adolescents because adolescent muscles have not yet fully developed. Adult health risk is minimal.

Anabolic steroids will add testosterone to the bloodstream and thereby increase male aggression and, as a male hormone, it improves upper body muscle mass, primarily in the shoulder girdle area. It is exactly this area that has little effect on player performance because pitching, and especially hitting power, comes from the thigh area and the lower torso.

Power involving swinging a bat or throwing a ball is not dependent on the arms, which act merely as the holders of the bat or ball. Just try swinging a bat or throwing a ball while keeping your thighs and your torso very still.

When the media attacked Alex Rodriguez’s use of steroids, I decided to check my analysis of Rodriguez’s performance during the years from 2001 to 2003 when he was taking steroids to see if Alex’s performance improved during that period. A-Rod’s performance went down each year! If my analysis proved anything at all, it proved that steroids may have hurt, not helped his performance.

So why is there all this fuss about steroid use in baseball rather than in sports where steroids could actually improve performance?

Profit drives sports industry

Professional sports leagues are huge multibillion dollar industries directly connected to the banks and the entire ruling class. Professional sports are part of the entertainment industry. The sports industry must produce surplus value just like every other capitalist industry. The players are high priced workers performing under contract to some of the richest capitalists in the world. Just as in other industries, drug testing is a way for the bosses to put unions on the defensive. Every union tries to fight against drug testing of its members.

Professional baseball is the biggest professional sports industry in the U.S. Major league baseball teams are huge transnational operations. Each team’s massive organization includes subsidiary teams in the minor leagues, at AAA, at AA, at High-A, and Low-A, with players under contract to the major league team but playing for subsidiary team owners who are dependent on the quality of players that are lent to them, and then a pair of teams in short season rookie ball directly owned by the major league team. The major league teams have training facilities in the Dominican Republic and Venezuela where they can obtain lower cost talent, as well as scouts looking for talent all over the world.

The minor league franchises are so profitable that the major league team owners have been successfully able to “blackmail” minor league cities into building new stadiums by threatening to move their franchise to another city. KFC, McDonald’s, Burger King and Wendy’s are each individual cartels that compete with each other in the fast food industry. Major league baseball is a cartel of 30 team franchises that have a complete monopoly on their industry. When Barry Bonds was “blacklisted” by the 30 team owners in 2008, he had nowhere else to go for equivalent employment.

The Major League Baseball Players Association (MLBPA) and the steroids issue date back to the very same year: 1968. The steroids issue began with the 1968 Mexico City Olympics. The Olympics are the corporate sports version of the United Nations, with a capitalist structure that is dominated by U.S. imperialism.

Olympics and anti-communist hysteria

The steroids issue began to percolate at the 1960 Olympics with insinuations that the Soviet athletes were getting an illegal advantage. As a result—prior to the 1968 Olympics—the International Olympic Committee instituted new anti-doping regulations and dope detection tests. During the 1968 Mexico City Olympics revolutionary tensions came to a boil.

Oct. 2, 1968, ten days before the start of the 1968 Summer Olympics, was the date of the Tlatelolco massacre in Mexico City, in which more than 300 student protesters were killed by the Mexican army and police. In 1968, for the first time, athletes from East and West Germany were members of separate teams, after having been told to compete in a combined German team in 1956, 1960 and 1964.

At the 1968 Olympics, Black Power protests were made by U.S. athletes, most notably Tommie Smith and John Carlos, who, during the playing of the U.S. national anthem, raised their black gloved fists on the winners’ stand, a defiant statement of Black Power which electrified the world in possibly the greatest moment in sports history.

The Mexico City Olympics were the first Olympics televised worldwide using communication satellites. Six months before the Mexico City Olympics, Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in Memphis. The Soviet athletes again dominated at the 1968 Olympics, but it was the amazing performances of the East German [German Democratic Republic] athletes, as well as others from the other socialist countries in Eastern Europe, that outraged U.S. imperialism.

The Cold War was at its height and U.S. imperialism was bogged down in Vietnam. The victories of little East Germany over the mighty U.S. constituted “the straw that broke the camel’s back” and the imperialist colossus needed an explanation of why its great athletes were being bested by little East Germany.

Do you remember all the attacks in the media leveled against the East German athletes, particularly against the women? The media raised a furor stating that they were cheating by using illegal substances. Never did they mention that illegal drugs were in use at least as much by the U.S. athletes at the 1968 games or that steroids and other drugs were more widely used by professional and amateur U.S. athletes in general, because the U.S. is a richer country, where it is much easier to obtain these drugs.

Following the 1968 Olympics, and as a result of the whipped up hysteria against the East German athletes, steroid use became “controversial.” The witch hunt over steroid use was about to begin in earnest.

Sports Illustrated opened up the attack on steroid use in its June 23, 1969, issue in a piece written by Bill Gilbert. A close reading of the article is very revealing in actually showing the widespread use of steroids by athletes all over the world, especially by U.S. athletes. Yet the resultant propaganda was to place into the public’s mind that the East German and other communist athletes were cheaters. Here are some quotes from that article:

“The oftentimes bitter confrontation between the United States and Communist teams has understandably produced a lot of such feelings. ‘We are usually a long way behind the Russians in drug use,’ says U.S. Weight Lifter Bill Starr. ‘They make a scientific study of it. If they come up with something good, their teams all get it. Here it is a hit or miss thing.’”

The article goes on to say: “The Russians, according to Americans, had a new wonder, anti-tension, pro-concentration pill. Some East Europeans were said to be taking a caffeine concentrate as a pick-me-up before competition. But East Europeans believe the same thing about Americans. Foreign athletes find it inconceivable that American athletes, coming from the land of towering pill factories, are not the most thoroughly doped competitors in the world. ‘American athletes have the most expensive urine in the world,’ says Ray Baldwin, trainer at Xavier University and formerly with the Cincinnati Royals.

“It took four physicians to revive the marathon winner of the 1904 St. Louis Olympics, an American, Tom Hicks, who proved to be loaded on strychnine and brandy.”

Big business, gov’t target baseball union

Now let’s go to major league baseball. The MLBPA is a product of that revolutionary period, and it is a product of the civil rights movement. Baseball players had no rights prior to 1968. They could be traded from team to team at will and most players, even many stars, had to work second jobs in the off season.

In 1968, Curt Flood, a proud Black athlete and the star centerfielder for the St. Louis Cardinals, challenged the reserve clause and refused to report to the Philadelphia Phillies, the team he was traded to. While Curt Flood personally lost his challenge to the reserve clause and never played again, the players ended up winning the war as a result of his action because it made the players realize that they had to make a stand against the owners so as to win some control over their lives.

The players united behind the MLBPA and the union immediately entered into battle with the fabulously rich team owners. Over the years, the MLBPA won every strike and the union was often referred to in the big-business media as the most powerful union in the U.S. Being the most powerful union means being the biggest target of corporate revenge!

It is the steroid witch hunt that has given the team owners their first and only victory against the baseball union, but the team owners needed the help of the government in order to obtain that victory. John McCain called Senate hearings on steroids in baseball by dragging helpless, star baseball players before his Senate committee with the television cameras and the whole country watching in a witch hunt atmosphere. By this means, the team owners were finally able to get the union to accept a new contract with concessions, and without needing a lockout. One of those concessions wrung from the union was the agreement for drug testing of all players.

The corporate media are now claiming that an official of the MLBPA had been tipping off players just before they were to be tested. Some in the corporate media have stated that, if proven, this would allow the team owners to rip up the union contract. The use of steroids as a means of racist attack on star Black athletes like Barry Bonds, Ben Johnson and Marion Jones cannot be ignored.

On a positive note, I was very pleased to see Hank Aaron defend Barry Bonds last week as the legitimate home run record holder. The MLBPA is the most powerful union in sports and the sports bosses are using the steroid “weapon of mass distraction” to try to put the players and their union on the defensive.

We need to stand shoulder to shoulder with the players and their union against the corporate bosses and defend the players that have come under attack, be it Barry Bonds, Mark McGwire, Alex Rodriguez or Roger Clemens.

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