Almost all the suspended Major League Baseball players connected to the Biogenesis Clinic are from the Dominican Republic. Coincidence?
Not at all, according to Dave Zirin, a blogger for the magazine The Nation.
Zirin writes (and you can read the full post here):
“Any serious discussion about performance-enhancing drugs and baseball needs to deal with the fact of who is getting caught. Major League owners choose to invest billions of dollars in Latin America to develop talent on the cheap in the school’s baseball academies. In the Dominican Republic, where 40 percent of the country lives below the poverty line, steroids are actually legal and available over the counter.”
Zirin also writes, and I tend to agree with him, that the Major League Baseball Players Union needs to stand behind their man. It might not be the popular thing to do, but it’s the thing to do:
“A-Rod’s lack of support however is exactly what makes him such low-hanging fruit for Bud Selig. And that’s precisely why the Major League Baseball Players Association needs to be fighting his suspension tooth and nail. Unions are not supposed to be fan clubs. They are not organizations of the righteous, the pure or the politically pitch-perfect. If they are to be worth a damn, in baseball or anywhere, they need to be the broadest of broad churches: institutions that will defend their most loathsome members because they understand that “an injury to one is an injury to all” is more than a slogan on a T-shirt. If a player can no longer take the field when appealing a suspension, that also disempowers the entire point of an appeal’s process; and if Bud Selig can get away with invoking the “best interests of the game” clause on A-Rod, then a precedent has been set and no one is safe.”
