MartyConlonOnTheRun wrote:ReasonablySober wrote:Craig Calcaterra brought up something interesting yesterday. Lotta people want language written into a contract that allows teams to void deals. Imagine the first time a guy on a team friendly deal commits a violation. Or a guy wants out of a town or wants a new deal and decides he's gonna get caught to facilitate it.
I think that is highly unlikely. That's a huge risk for the player and his reputation for something with little reward. If it is so team friendly, I bet the team rides it out and trades him later and wouldn't consider voiding the contract. With more testing and more people getting caught, teams are less likely to take a PR hit.
I agree with you. Teams would likely evaluate each situation on it's own merits. If they felt it was still in their best interest to keep the player, they would take the PR hit and keep the contract. If though a player had an ugly contract like say A-Rod, Pujols, Hamilton, etc, they'd dump that contract faster than a virgin busts his load getting tail for the first time.
To me, if baseball and the players/union really want to lessen the amount of PED use, in the next CBA just really jack up the penalties.
1. Allow contracts to be voided
2. First failed test, a 150 game suspension
3. Second failed test, lifetime ban
4. Include any failed tests which happened in the minors to carry over to the majors so say a guy gets caught and serves 150 games in the minors, if he gets caught again in the majors, he's banned for life.
Mix in the huge damage to the reputations of players caught in today's MLB, something like that above i think would make players have to think much harder before trying to beat the system, even though new drugs will continue being created which make it tougher for testers to catch.
Whether it's MLB or the NFL, the current penalties are just to soft to be a really major deterrent against athletes rolling the dice on getting away with using PED's, especially for non-super high profile players. A 4 game suspension in football and 50 game suspension in baseball is pretty much a slap on the wrist for guys making pro sports money. The only guys which a first time offense can hurt bad are very high profile baseball players given they get savaged in the media to the point their reputations get ruined and i do think that hurts big time for guys like Braun. He's clearly a prideful and very goal orientated athlete. It has to really sting knowing that he was well on his way to being in the HOF after he retired and now that's almost assuredly down the toilet, along with being despised by most of his peers in the game.