by Todd Pheifer

Created on: October 17, 2009

There has been a lot of press lately in major league baseball about cheating, particularly with performance enhancing drugs. The major challenge with this issue is that many accusations have been made but a few players have admitted to wrongdoing and there is still a great deal of information that is not available. Therefore, punishing players who have cheated sounds like a great concept but there are many logistical concerns that would have to be addressed. Here are a few thoughts on whether major league baseball should erase statistics for players who have been shown to have cheated during the year.

History lesson

One particular problem with this issue is that historians might suggest that cheating is not a new thing. Some writers and baseball experts would argue that players have been cheating since the very beginning of the game. Unfortunately, many of these stories are unverified, which makes it nearly impossible to draw any conclusions. Is it fair for modern-day baseball to hold current players to a different standard than players from the past?

Fuzzy rules

Another difficulty faced by baseball is the fact that the league was very slow to put rules in place regarding performance-enhancing drugs. Therefore, many players that took certain substances a few years ago may have technically been following the rules, even though the court of public opinion might judge them to be guilty. Again, few players are coming forward and spilling their guts to the American public. This leaves the league in a situation where they would have to make judgments based on incomplete data.

Do people really care?

Finally, there is the issue of fan apathy. People know that some of their favorite players have been cheating, and people also know that some of those players may have been cheating their entire careers. The reality is that fans keep going to games and it is possible that the bulk of fans do not really care about performance-enhancing drugs or other situations where a player may be trying to get an edge over the competition. Some people do not even see this as cheating. Rather, they accept that a professional player in this sort of situation will do just about anything to stay competitive. In a morally relative world, many fans could see themselves doing exactly the same thing.

There are certainly people that would like to see the game of baseball display a bit more purity. However, baseball is a business and the league is not going to make decisions that would jeopardize their reputation, their fan base, or their sponsors. Cheating is not necessarily good for business, but without hard proof many of the accusations are just bits of disconnected data. For the time being the league probably feels it is best to continue on as usual and put out small fires as they come up.

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