Just when it seemed that Major League Baseball had already reached its peak incompetence, another wrinkle manages to appear.
As you probably know, MLB is well into a lockout that has a delayed spring training and start to the regular season looking inevitable. The league and the MLBPA have made little progress in talks, and last week’s meetings ended without a counter offer from MLB. But on Monday, the Associated Press pointed out another issue stemming from the work stoppage:
Baseball isn’t drug testing its players during the lockout.
According to AP, MLB stopped testing players for the first time in 20 years after the drug-testing agreement expired this offseason.
While this doesn’t mean that baseball will become the PED free-for-all of Steroid Era again, it does create a concerning window of test-free time for players. The lockout started on Dec. 2 — just as the testing agreement also expired — so some players could potentially choose to use PEDs for offseason training and be clean by the time the testing agreement gets renewed.
The news understandably surprised baseball fans, and some thought it meant that baseball was permanently ending drug testing (it is not). Either way, it was quite the development given how Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens were recently shut out of the Hall of Fame. Classic MLB.