Baseball is getting around to penalizing players in the last round of PED troubles. The Biogenesis scandal promises to take down 20 players using records from the closed lab. Baseball seems determined to use this case to make an example of some guys. Banning players for 90 games is a big penalty and puts the player at risk of a permanent ban. Braun is a confirmed liar and now he has two strikes against him. Another pinch and he is gone for good. That’s the theory anyway. Baseball, like the rest of America is spineless these days.

The great error baseball made was agreeing to a bunch of rules and procedures that invite the lawyers into the room. They want this stuff out of the game for a some very good reasons. The press may claim fans don’t care, but the press is full of idiots. The home run blitz we saw in the last decade was getting ridiculous and would have undermined the game. Plus, someone was going to have a stroke or take a liner off the head and die. Former players would be in TV boo-hooing about how they wrecked their bodies for those evil owners.

The way to do it was not an overly complicated process negotiated with the union. The first step was to ban all of the names in the Mitchell Report for life. Following the example of gambling 100 years ago, would most likely make cases like the one we see today unnecessary. Banning the players they knew cheated and were named in the report would have sent the same message Kenesaw Mountain Landis sent to baseball when he banned the Black Sox players for life. From that point forward, you could have testing, but you would know that the commissioner reserved the right to throw you out of the game for life. That would put an end to this for all but the dumbest of players.

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