Fixing Baseball by the Start of Spring Training

Commisioner Selig, Senator Mitchell and Players' Union Leader Donald Fehr were all on Capitol Hill today. The tone of today's committee meetings was nearly a complete 180 from the tone of the meetings three years ago; today's meetings were almost congratulatory in nature.

To be sure, MLB and the Players' Union have re-opened their collective bargaining agreement several times and Baseball now has the toughest anti-doping policy among all of the US & Canadian professional sports leagues. Cause for a pat on the back? Yes. Are they done? No.

Selig and Fehr want to put all the questions to rest before Spring Training opens in just over a month. Selig and Fehr have agreed to adopt many of Sen. Mitchell's recommendations outlined in his report. In his opening statement, Selig vowed to develop a program "to require top prospects for the major league draft to submit to drug testing before the (amateur) draft." Plus Fehr and Selig have reached an accord allowing for 'no advance warning' of drug testing at the ballparks. They went on record saying that it is MLB's goal to have those policies in place by Spring Training.

But to truly restore the image of Baseball after the black eye that it has given itself - the administration and monitoring of these anti-doping policies should be handed over to a trusted third party. This is something that Selig has so far resisted in interviews, saying that Baseball can 'handle this internally'. I'm calling BS; handling things internally is how we arrived at today's situation.

I say hand the testing and monitoring over to the US Anti Doping Agency (USADA); the USADA manages in- and out-of-competition testing for athletes in the U.S. Olympic Movement including Olympic, Pan American, and Paralympic athletes. The USADA is experienced, it is trusted and the USADA is transparent. When it comes to restoring the luster of the game - letting the light in may be just what we need.