Ethics Newsline®

NEW YORK
Major League Baseball’s steroid habit continued to make headlines last week with allegations flying as far as the homeruns slammed out of the park by allegedly doped-up heavy hitters. Among the developments:

• Jose Canseco, the American League’s 1988 most valuable player, launched his new tell-all book on steroid use in professional baseball by naming names, saying he helped a handful of the sport’s top players inject themselves with steroids. His controversial remarks implicating Mark McGwire, Jason Giambi, Roger Clemens, Barry Bonds, and others, were dismissed by some critics as a stunt to fuel book sales with lies, reported USA Today.
• Canseco’s confessional book prompted questions about what to do with awards and records racked up by juiced-up ballplayers. Former Boston Red Sox outfielder Mike Greenwall, who lost the MVP award to Canseco in 1988, last week said the issue should be revisited. “Where’s my MVP?” Greenwell complained to a local Florida paper, according to the Reuters news agency. “(Canseco’s) an admitted steroid user. I was clean.”

• Despite those requests, Major League Baseball executive vice president Sandy Alderson last week said the organization likely would not undertake reviews of past steroid use based on Canseco’s charges. Saying MLB was a different organization in the 1990s when steroids apparently became widespread, Alderson told USA Today that MLB was committed to learning and to putting the past behind it. “The commissioner isn’t looking backward; he’s looking forward,” he said last week.
• Major League Baseball also took time last week to deny allegations that it ignored FBI warnings about steroid abuse in the mid-1990s. According to the Associated Press, FBI special agent Greg Stejskal told reporters that he informed baseball officials that Canseco and others were using illegal steroids. Saying his warnings apparently fell on deaf ears, Stejskal said that while Major League Baseball may not have sanctioned steroid use, “they certainly looked the other way.” But the MLB official allegedly alerted to the steroid use last week denied the report, saying, “It did not happen.”