Baseball Official Rips Reinstatement of Howe

The decision to reinstate Steve Howe because, according to the arbitrator, the pitcher’s drug problem was caused by a psychiatric disorder and because the commissioner’s office did not adequately test the pitcher, has angered baseball officials.

Steve Greenberg, baseball’s deputy commissioner, Thursday issued a written dissent to arbitrator George Nicolau’s 54-page opinion. Howe was hospitalized six times for treatment between 1982 and 1988, yet, Nicolau, on Nov. 12, overturned the lifetime ban imposed June 26.

“In one facile sentence, (Nicolau) explains away a decade of substance abuse, admitted illegal behavior and discredit to baseball,” Greenberg wrote.

“The standard for discipline is no longer whether one repeatedly and admittedly breaks a well defined rule but, rather, whether one can find a medical expert to couch an explanation for the aberrant behavior in terms of a deep-seated medical or psychiatric disorder. Thus, does chairman Nicolau usher in a new era for baseball, one in which even the most fundamental and time-honored taboos (e.g., gambling or assaulting an umpire) may be washed clean with the proper psychiatric testimony.”

Nicolau had written in his decision: “We know now that Howe has an underlying psychiatric disorder that was never diagnosed or treated; that this disorder has been a contributing factor to his use of drugs; and that, absent treatment for the condition, he remains vulnerable to such use.

“The office of the commissioner cannot escape its measure of responsibility for what took place in 1991. . . . To give Howe ‘yet another chance’ of returning to the game without implementing those conditions was not, in my judgment, a fair shot at success.”