Steroid issue about health, not home runs

Here is Major League Baseball’s curious rule about steroid abuse: Five strikes and maybe you’re out.

No matter that NFL players who test positive for steroids get hit with immediate game suspensions and fines, Olympians lose medals and minor league baseball players get tested four times a year and face immediate disciplinary action if they test positive.

What makes baseball’s latest crisis so frustrating is that the players’ union has dragged its feet on creating a tough substance-abuse testing program.

Up until the past season, big league players weren’t even subject to disciplinary action. So, surprise, the sport faces a crisis after allegations that Jason Giambi used steroids for several seasons and that Barry Bonds, Gary Sheffield and plenty of others might have taken performance-enhancing drugs.

Players and their union leaders should immediately agree to a tough testing policy. The difficulty of that is reflected in baseball Commissioner Bud Selig’s unveiled invitation Monday for federal intervention.

Forget talk-show chatter about whether Bonds’ records should carry an asterisk. These drugs can cause cancer, organ failure and death.

As Surgeon General Richard H. Carmona put it Monday, it “is less a moral or ethical issue than it is a public health issue.’’

Like it or not, big leaguers are role models.

And if high school athletes choose to emulate barrel-chested men with forearms the size of tree trunks, there will be intense pressure on youngsters to inject or ingest whatever is necessary to shape bodies capable of hitting balls farther than seems humanly possible.

At a deadly cost to their health.

—This editorial appeared in
The Los Angeles Times