Baseball Players Yield on Steroids

Major league baseball players, facing pressure from Congress, fans and the commissioner, authorized union leaders Tuesday to seek an agreement for tougher rules against steroids, possibly in time for next year’s spring training.

Donald Fehr, executive director of the Major League Baseball Players’ Assn., said the union’s executive board “authorized us to attempt to conclude an agreement” with the commissioner’s office, adding, “I don’t think it will take an extended period of time.”

Amending the current collective bargaining agreement, which is not due to expire until December 2006, would be unprecedented in the sport’s labor history -- and a rare step for any union not threatened by drastic changes such as plant closures or layoffs, one labor expert said.

The union’s decision to negotiate for stricter rules comes after more than a year of court testimony, news reports and baseball’s own studies suggesting that players, some of them among the game’s top sluggers, used steroids and other performance-enhancing substances.

The disclosures have outraged fans -- some jeered San Francisco’s Barry Bonds last season with chants of “BALCO, BALCO,” a reference to the ongoing criminal case involving a Bay Area nutritional supplement lab -- and spurred politicians to threaten legislative action.

“I don’t think they had any choice,” said Peter Roby, director of the Center for the Study of Sport in Society at Northeastern University. “With the fans’ reaction and the government breathing down their neck ... it was really the only thing they could do. That horse is leaving the barn, and they need to be on it.”

Baseball Commissioner Bud Selig has repeatedly called for the union to accept a steroid testing and punishment program in line with that used in the non-union minor leagues. The drive gained new urgency in the last week amid disclosure of secret grand jury testimony by Bonds, considered by many the game’s premier player, and former American League most valuable player Jason Giambi.

Bonds, who needs 52 home runs to tie the career record, testified that he used substances provided to him by a defendant in the BALCO steroid distribution case -- his personal trainer -- and Giambi, of the New York Yankees, admitted injecting himself with steroids, according to reports in the San Francisco Chronicle.

After those reports, Sens. John McCain (R-Ariz.) and Byron L. Dorgan (D-N.D.) renewed warnings that baseball would face congressional action if it did not adopt stricter measures, and President Bush enlisted long-time friend Roland Betts, a New York developer and once a fellow investor in the American League’s Texas Rangers, to encourage a settlement.

David Ross, a Dodger catcher and the team’s player representative, called the players’ authorization a “preliminary” step to amending the contract.

“Our hope is that they can come to a resolution.... We know this is more than just our game, so we’re taking all these things into consideration,” Ross said, acknowledging that the steroid issue affects more than just players.

Fehr, speaking to reporters at a long-scheduled meeting here with player representatives from the 30 major league ballclubs, said he expected to resume talks by next week with Rob Manfred, lead negotiator for the commissioner’s office.

“We’re pleased the union has decided to join us in an effort to reach an agreement on a very serious issue,” Manfred said in a telephone interview. “We’re optimistic we can do that in short order.”

Under a policy negotiated in 2002 and not put into its penalty phase until this year, players are tested for steroids annually. Those who test positive enter counseling, and a second offense could draw a 15-game suspension. After five positive tests, a player could be banned for a year.

The current testing program has drawn criticism as weak from many quarters -- fans, international doping authorities, the commissioner and some players. Though Fehr said Tuesday that testing during the 2004 season showed fewer positive steroid results than in 2003, when baseball’s “survey” testing yielded positive results in 5% to 7% of players, union leaders appeared to yield to that criticism.

“We said [in 2002] and thereafter that one of the things we would see in this agreement is we would have actual experience under it, and that would tell us some things,” he said. “I think the preliminary indications are, although I can’t go into details, that the testing program we had this year had some pretty significant positive effects.

“That doesn’t mean, however, that given the experience we had, that there can’t be amendments which can’t be better than that.”

Under the minor league system, backed by Selig and endorsed by McCain, players can be tested randomly up to four times, are suspended for 15 games after one offense and are banned for life after five offenses.

The union is amenable to many of the minor league points, according to sources close to the situation, and negotiations will continue to focus on the four previous differences in major and minor league testing: substances tested for, frequency of testing, off-season testing and discipline.

The sides appear to agree on the list of banned substances, which will include anabolic steroids, prohormone nutritional supplements, ephedrine, human growth hormone, erythropoietin (EPO) and masking and diuretic agents, and to off-season testing.

Testing frequency and punishment appear to be the final obstacles. Suspensions could be shorter on the major league level, but also would be without pay, and thus costlier.

The sides have not discussed the parameters for blood testing, which has been required to expose the banned human growth hormone.

But some anti-doping experts said the major leagues should go even further -- to adopt the type of program used for Olympic sports, in which athletes are subject to tests year-round, without notice, and a first-time positive test means a two-year ban from competition.

“Baseball is so out of the ballpark that they can no longer continue to stonewall this,” Gary Wadler, a Long Island physician, professor at New York University medical school and one of the nation’s leading anti-doping experts said this week. “I don’t think the answer is what Selig is suggesting. It’s incrementally better but it’s substantively no different.”

The players’ association has attained remarkable prosperity and freedom for its members -- currently about 1,200 -- in the last four decades. The organization’s clout began to grow in 1966, when it named Marvin Miller, a onetime economist for the United Steelworkers, as its first executive director.

Miller, now retired, said players would be making a mistake by reopening the current contract -- baseball’s first to require steroid testing.

“If they gives up anything, they will have been bluffed out of their shoes, socks and underpants,” Miller, 87, told Bloomberg news service.

From a labor standpoint, Mark Conrad, associate professor of legal and ethical studies at Fordham University, called the move by players “pretty major news,” adding that “it is unusual for any union to open up a collective bargaining agreement. They’re not going to open up their agreements, because it could set a precedent for the future.”

He said that in other areas of business, unions might renegotiate an agreement if a factory were about to close or many workers were about to lose their jobs, but in sports, “it’s quite rare.”

“But in this case,” Conrad added, “I’m not surprised because the publicity against the union would have been so great if they didn’t.”

Times staff writers David Wharton and Alan Abrahamson contributed to this report.