NEW YORK DAILY NEWS
Wednesday, May 23rd 2007, 9:07 AM
BOSTON - The big quote from Jason Giambi last week in USA Today, where he talked about steroids without talking about them, where he said he was wrong to use that "stuff," turns out to be the one about drug testing.
"I'm probably tested more than anybody else," Giambi said. And the question you had to ask when you read that quote was a simple one:
Why?
Why would Jason Giambi be subject to more random testing than anybody else?
Now we know why.
Baseball did not have the right to pick on Giambi just because he testified - and quite honestly, from everything we know - in front of the BALCO grand jury. There is no place in the new drug agreement where you get dragged out of line because the government asked you questions and you answered them.
According to baseball's drug policy, unless he tested positive for steroids, which would have been made public, the only way Giambi could be subject to more testing than anybody else, six additional tests per year, is if he tested positive for amphetamines. Your name does not go into the paper for one positive test, unless you get found out the way Giambi gets found out now. You do not get suspended for the first one. Strike one, but six additional tests.
If it had been a positive for steroids, everybody in baseball would have known, the commissioner's office and the Players Association and the New York Yankees. And Giambi would have been suspended. There is no positive test for steroids on Giambi, for that "stuff" he lectured baseball about in the newspaper last week, as if he were the one honest man in the whole sport.
What he really seemed to be saying in that article is that everybody in the whole sport should apologize for the things ballplayers were taking to get better and stronger in the days before baseball had an actual drug policy. But now you have to say that if somebody was still taking a banned substance and getting caught for that after a drug policy was in place is a hypocrite at best, somebody who doesn't get to lecture anybody about anything when it comes to drugs and baseball.
Giambi has refused to talk about the USA Today story for days now, clearly on advice of his counsel. When Giambi's agent, Arn Tellem, was asked by The News' T.J. Quinn about a positive test on Giambi for amphetamines, he first responded with a line about a "ridiculous" accusation and later said that he had no comment. Twice Giambi was asked by the Daily News about a positive test, and both times said he wasn't going to address this subject. Maybe it will come up when he meets with commissioner Bud Selig as early as this week and has what has a chance to be a wide-ranging conversation about "stuff."
There is always the general thought in baseball that amphetamines should be some sort of misdemeanor, just because "greenies" were a part of the sport's backroom culture, with a wink and a nod, for so long. But they are no longer. Amphetamines, and other similar stimulants, are classified by the DEA as Schedule 2 drugs. Steroids are Schedule 3. Banned substances both.
Maybe all the players who have gotten caught so far with a positive test still think that picking out which drugs are acceptable and which aren't is like moving along a buffet table. It doesn't work that way anymore.
Maybe in Giambi's mind, even substances now against the baseball law are still baseball's fault and not the player's fault. If that is the case, it is a definition of crime and punishment when it comes to drugs in baseball in which no user is ever really at fault.
Giambi also told USA Today last week that the "stuff" he says he took didn't help him hit home runs. Maybe so, and maybe it is just one of those nutty coincidences you get in sports and life sometimes that home runs in baseball are going down the way they are.
Maybe Giambi will flatly deny this today, discuss it today after saying for two straight days that he didn't want to discuss it. Maybe the Yankees will continue, in back-channel ways, to try to get out from under the last of Giambi's $120 million contract, which has this season and next season to run.
Or maybe he will start hitting again, the way he has in the past.
He started this with his own words this time. Talking about "stuff." Saying that he, Jason Giambi, got tested more than anybody else. For a long time he didn't say enough and then he said too much, and now he keeps moving up on the last great battleground for his sport:
The guaranteed contract.
For such a long time, in what became the steroid era of the sport, nobody on the players' side seemed particularly interested in the integrity of the game, just the integrity of the money coming in. Drug testing was supposed to be a great battleground and then the Players Association got backed into a corner on that one five years ago and had no choice. Now there is drug testing, for some more than others, apparently. And the battleground could become the sanctity and strength of contracts like Giambi's.
Always those contracts were supposed to be stronger than ballplayers wanted to become. Before long, we might find out if those contracts are made of the same strong stuff guys like Giambi, and his agent, and his union, always thought they were.
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