A Challenge to Major League Baseball
Julio C. Malone

A complex network of jam-packed superhighways, interconnecting countless over-populated termite colonies, flows inside his home's walls. The boy jumps into his worn-out tennis shoes, and off he goes onto the muddy path seeking fresh air, a meal, or at least hope. Here comes a baseball scout peddling illusions, offering thousands of dollars to good players.

Each dollar is worth 30 pesos, a hallucinogenic amount of money.

At 15, destitute and chasing dreams, he drops out of school to join a baseball training camp. There he injects himself with a lethal cocktail of animal steroids to perform up to the scouts' expectations. He does it all for the money.

The teams sign the best among a generous supply of juiced-up kids, dumping the vast majority, strong, handsome, uneducated and unemployed. Many become criminals; others join prostitution rings servicing the Dominican Republic's booming tourism industry.

In 2001 Lino Ortiz, a 19-year-old pitcher, died after injecting himself with a cocktail of pig, horse and cow steroids. His friend, Boston Red Sox's José Manuel Avila, told the Washington Post that 70 percent of Dominican prospects were using animal steroids cocktails.

Almost 50 percent of minor leaguers are Dominicans, but Robert D. Manfred Jr., Major League Baseball (MLB) drug czar, deserves the MVP for successfully refusing to test them. It is too "expensive and complicated," he said before saying, "We don't want to flush a lot of money down the toilet." He elaborated on this slippery non-statement: "We're trying to gather some information and re-evaluate what we want to be doing." Now he whines, "Unfortunately, the laws in the Dominican Republic forbid us from suspending steroid violators and make the operation of an optimal program more difficult."

That's juiced-up nonsense.

No law prohibits employers from banning substances that directly affect their employees' productivity.

During Congress' grandstanding on steroids in the pre-season, California Democrat Henry Waxman asked if any "diabolical foreign country" was smuggling steroids into the United States. He should have the historical records straight; those who ignore history will be ignored by history.

Using research confiscated from Nazi labs as spoils of war, doctor John Ziegler, a weight-lifting fan, produced the first steroids in York, Pa., in 1958, to help the United States defeat the Soviets in the Olympics.

Dominicans accepted steroids as another U.S. miracle, like the polio vaccine of yesteryear or McDonald's today. Then the United States turned the tables around, controlling steroids here, but U.S. labs kept producing and distributing them freely down there, creating sublimely ridiculous situations.

Frank Almonte, a Dominican tele-evangelist in Queens, was arrested at NYC-JFK airport in 1999 while attempting to bring illegal steroids for his son, a 12-year-old weight lifter. The charges against him were dropped because he bought them legally in the Dominican Republic.

Dominicans were taught all about steroids' benefits, but nothing about its dangers. Our ignorance and poverty, seasoned with steroids and cooked in the international legal system loopholes, have proven very profitable for baseball moguls. An "evil" cross-pollination of drugs and greed has produced this steroids-fueled performance-guided madness, killing U.S. and Dominican children alike.

Bob Dylan may ask:
How many dead kids will it take 'til we know that too many children have died?

We must ask:
Do we really want baseball to inspire our children while harming so many other children?

Should die-hard fans like Fidel Castro, Kim Jong Il, and Hugo Chávez form a coalition to launch a pre-emptive attack and save Cooperstown from becoming Steroidstown?

Baseball, once a beacon of hope, our all time best goodwill ambassador to the world, now kills the very children it used to lift from poverty. And it will soon be fueling anti-Americanism, unless MLB's draft goes global with a serious steroids testing program.

Pioneering racial integration with Jackie Robinson is baseball's history. With a global draft, the Old Ballgame will be exporting United States labor standards to eventually protect workers worldwide.

This is history in the making.

In this "with or against us" world everyone must take a stand: with or against history, with or against clean baseball. Politicians, union leaders and corporate tycoons are up.

(Dominican journalist Julio C. Malone is a Fellow of the Knight Center for Specialized Journalism, and author of "Sammy Sosa in 9 Innings." He may be contacted at editor@hispaniclink.org)

© 2005, Hispanic Link News Service
08/14/05
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