Major League Baseball, which has spent much of this decade under extreme congressional scrutiny regarding performance-enhancing substances, is relishing the start of a far different relationship with Capitol Hill.
The House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, which held Wednesday’s testy hearing featuring pitcher Roger Clemens and trainer Brian McNamee regarding Clemens’ alleged steroid use, plans no further hearings involving MLB or the Mitchell Report on baseball’s history with steroids.
That stance was widely expected among MLB management after last month’s hearing on the report, a session that included MLB Commissioner Bud Selig, union chief Donald Fehr and the report’s author, former Sen. George Mitchell, but committee leadership last week confirmed its intent now is to assume a much more removed position regarding baseball and steroids.
“We’re basically done with this chapter now, and we’re going to take a step back and see how they do,” said Rep. Tom Davis, R-Va. “We’re looking forward to seeing how they do implementing the rest of the Mitchell Report recommendations.”
Before the hearing last month, Selig instituted corrective measures from the Mitchell Report that he could do alone, such as the formation of a league department of investigations. Recommendations that must be collectively bargained with the players’ union remain the point of continuing talks described by industry sources as productive. With spring training camps now open, though, original hopes of having the amendment to the drug policy complete by early February — representing a historic third reopening of an existing labor deal in a little more than three years — have slipped slightly past schedule.
Still, MLB executives described the committee’s desire to move on as the best news coming out of an otherwise difficult day last Wednesday.
Trainer Brian McNamee, investigator Charlie
Scheeler and pitcher Roger Clemens (from left)
prepare to testify before the House Oversight
and Government Reform Committee last week.
Both Clemens and McNamee held stridently firm to their conflicting stories during the nearly five-hour session, even as inconsistencies and falsehoods in both their stances were repeatedly exposed by panel members. Committee Chairman Henry Waxman, D-Calif., wanted to cancel the session before it even happened but was urged not to do so by Clemens’ attorneys.
MLB President Bob DuPuy, speaking after the hearing, called the session “very discouraging.”
“Nothing new [emerged] in the sense that each party’s positions had been staked out well before and each witness stuck to his guns. … [But] the most encouraging element of this was Chairman Waxman saying that they intend to move on and don’t see the need for more hearings.”
Future contact with the oversight committee will likely be led by updates on the evolution and implementation of the drug policy.
The House Subcommittee on Commerce, Trade and Consumer Protection, meanwhile, is still looking to weigh in on the issue and has set a Feb. 27 hearing to look at steroid use in sports. Officials from each of the major American sports leagues are slated to appear there.
MLB does not see the frenzy surrounding Clemens and McNamee posing a serious threat to existing business lines, even as one or both men could still find himself the subject of Justice Department perjury investigation to join one started for Houston Astros shortstop Miguel Tejada. Ticket sales are strong in many markets, and a fifth consecutive league attendance record remains well in sight. MLB sponsor activation is also expected to reach record levels in 2008.
But many around the game bemoaned the Clemens-McNamee circus drawing media attention away from the beginning of spring training. New York Yankees shortstop Derek Jeter, already working out last week at the club’s camp in Tampa, told reporters there, “It’s a bad time for the game.”
While corrective reforms by MLB and the players represent much of the reason for the congressional shift from baseball, the interest from Washington — even as similar drug problems plague other sports — in many ways simply collapsed upon itself. After several much-ballyhooed oversight committee hearings that spurred baseball to new levels of testing and disciplinary rigor, panel members repeatedly bemoaned the Clemens-McNamee hearing as nothing more than a pointless exercise of “he said, he said,” that exacerbated partisan divisions.
By the end of the hearing, several fatigued members, including Rep. Christopher Shays, R-Conn., had their heads in their hands.
“We’re playing gotcha games. We’re not doing government oversight,” said Rep. Virginia Foxx, R-N.C. “I wish we would really get back to what our job is.”
