sleepcamel.net : brad weikel

Today is a big day for baseball, obviously, with the release of the Mitchell Report, and I've seen a number of different reactions--

• The journalistic:Steroid Report Implicates Top Players
• The curiously analytical: Is Today Mark McGwire’s Best Day in Years?
• The heavy handed: "not only do I not respect you as players, but I don’t respect you as people"

The second link, from Stephen Dubner of Freakonomics, is the one that interests me the most, because it hints at some notion of amnesty. I've been trying to find someone who was taking that position even further, but haven't had much luck (including in my own blog, where I was sure I'd posted at length about Floyd Landis and argued for amnesty in cycling).

In any case, two of the most important things to point out are that (1) the Mitchell Report notes that every team in MLB has been associated with an implicated player, and (2) the Mitchell Report suggests that players should not be punished for past offenses (according to the NY Times article above; I haven't read the whole Mitchell report).

What possible reason could there be to NOT punish them? Well, as Bud Selig repeated about 95 times in his press conference just over an hour ago, it's important to focus on the future. Huh? OK, focusing on the future is great and all, and its the same rosy thought that the Mitchell Report hints at, but is that reason (or reasoned) enough?

Probably not. Fortunately, there's another way to look at it, beyond the cute little "let's move forward" rhetoric. Here's how: MLB, as an institution, is broken. This is not a case of rogue individuals committing deviant acts against the clear rule of law. This is a case of institutional failure, and the breakdown of the rule of law, which has led to widespread acts of self-interest.

We've heard about rule of law a lot lately, with respect to reconstruction in Iraq and Afghanistan, among many other troubled states. This may be overkill for a piece on baseball, but the US State Department has a lot to say about the role of the rule of law in democratic society. The general point is that, without rule of law, you can't have civil society. I'd argue that this is because the lack of security (and the competition for insecure resources) leads to acts of self-interest... an individual's survival becomes more important than his adherence to normative morals (whether established privately, socially, or legally).

So the question, about steroids in baseball, is whether it even makes sense to punish individuals. Were these players in the wrong? Of course they were... they made choices, often the wrong ones. But were there factors that influenced them (particularly the breakdown of the rule of law), that made them more likely to make those choices, to compete in a way they normally wouldn't have? I think so.

What I'm describing isn't just a bandwagon effect. It's about an intense and volatile struggle for insecure resources (stardom, starting positions, etc), in which the deviant actions of some individuals not only encourage others to hop on board, but DEMAND that they hop on board, merely to survive. That is not to say that they did not make individual choices to cheat... obviously they did. But even the very act of making such a choice was necessitated by the conditions of the struggle. The breakdown of the rule of law prevents individuals from making the same moral choices they would normally make.

I'll jump to cycling, briefly, because I think its a more intuitive case. In the past few years, nearly every contender for the Tour de France has been implicated, in some way, in a steroid scandal. Floyd Landis was one of only a handful caught in the Tour itself, but nearly everyone is implicated in some way. Cycling officials, however, have responded in the same knee-jerk way that many respond to MLB steroid issues: Ban them! Ban them!

But banning them doesn't make sense. Everybody is guilty. Or, put differently, nobody is guilty. Would you rather watch the 20 best athletes in the world compete for a championship, knowing that they may be juiced, or would you rather watch a bunch of clean but second-tier athletes compete for the same prize? As much as we like to think we'd chose the latter, the reality is that we chose the former every day, by continuing to watch the big events instead of, say, high school sports where (we hope) the athletes are all clean. We want to see the best compete at the highest level, above all else, and we'd simply prefer that they aren't juiced.

So there's a clear case for some sort of amnesty here: Come clean, and stay clean, and we'll consider you clean.

This is also, on a side note, precisely the way to focus on the future. That's the reason that Nelson Mandela and other South African leaders advocated for amnesty after the end of Apartheid. It wasn't so people could get off without punishment; it wasn't even a basic gesture of forgiveness, though that's how it is often described; it was, rather, the recognition that the future was contingent upon people coming clean, and THEN forgiving and moving on.

I'm tempted to launch into a tirade here, about all the other amnesty related issues out there, including oh, I don't know: "illegal" immigration. But I'll stop. For now.