When I was a young boy, I remember using the term “Chinese water torture” for any activity that seemed long, torturous and pointless. I have been reminded of this repeatedly over the last few years as slowly, almost one-by-one, the names of baseball players who tested positive for some sort of performance enhancing drugs have become public.

Anonymous and confidential drug testing, conducted for Major League baseball and the MLB Players Association in 2003 to determine the extent of the drug problem, has turned out to be not so confidential.

Obviously, some of the anonymity has been taken out of the process by various leaks from a sealed document of a grand jury. Some law abiding journalists have managed somehow to get this information and have it confirmed and published before anyone else beats them to it. Confidentiality be damned. Trust has become an unknown commodity in our tell-all world.

This week, the names of Manny Ramirez and David Ortiz leaked out a mere six years after the tests. In Manny’s case, there can be little surprise given the fact that he has just finished serving a 50-game suspension for failing a more recent test. In David Ortiz’s case, again the shock can’t be too big when one considers the circumstantial evidence drawn from changes in his career trajectory in the early part of this decade.

Despite all this, six-year-old news is being treated with the kind of sensation that a recent drug bust at your parish church might garner. Baseball writers have a special gift for defaming the game with old and tired news. They seem to have appointed themselves the special guardians of the purity of baseball across time, although given their limited vision, they are able to deal with only one set of drugs at a time.

They also can deal with only one sport at a time, or perhaps football has been too riddled with steroids from the start for anyone to care. And they insist on referring to the past 10-15 years as the Steroid Era. Perhaps it was.

However, if the “Steroid Era” becomes a specific designation for record keeping purposes, then shouldn’t there also be an “Amphetamine Era,” when players used greenies to make it through those difficult road trips, those day games after night games, and those first games after coming off coast-to-coast travel without a day off?

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Judge Sonia Sotomayor

, President Barack Obama’s nominee to the Supreme Court, attracted my attention in the spring of 1995 when she made the decision that ended the suicidal baseball strike that prevented a World Series in 1994 and threatened to destroy the 1995 baseball season.

Not only is Judge Sotomayor an excellent choice for the Supreme Court, but she also belongs in the Baseball Hall of Fame as the Judge Who Saved Baseball

eli

. What follows is a radio commentary I wrote for WUCF-FM in Orlando on April 5, 1995.

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After nearly eight months, some 232 days after it began, the strike by major league baseball players ended not at the bargaining table, but as the result of a judicial ruling by the youngest judge in the Southern District of New York.

At age 40, Judge Sonia Sotomayor is the first Puerto Rican appointed to the bench in this predominantly Puerto Rican district. A Yale Law Graduate, who grew up in South Bronx just a few blocks from Yankee Stadium, she was appointed to the bench by former Yale first-baseman George Bush on the recommendation of Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Richard Nixon’s designated hitter.

In her ruling, Judge Sotomayor clearly upheld the decision of the NLRB which found the owners in violation of labor law by imposing new conditions of employment on the players after unilaterally declaring an impasse in negotiations. She ordered the owners to restore the previous rules including salary arbitration, competitive bidding for free agents, and the anti-collusion provisions of the free agent rules.

The judge said that collective bargaining process was being threatened, and that she was re-enforcing the NLRB’s protection of the “spirit and the letter of federal labor law….” She also told owners they must return to her courtroom before they can declare an impasse in negotiations in the future.

The legal experts seem to agree that it was a very strong decision, and the owner’s lawyers thought it so strong that a lockout could put the owners in a position where they would be liable for players’ salaries, to the tune of $5 million a day.

The owners had clearly lost as they were told they were in violation of federal law and must rescind their actions. This does not mean that the players won. All it means is that we are back to square one. The players are back at work, there is no contract agreement, the parties remain far apart on the issues, and little or nothing has been resolved as a result of the eight month strike.

What has happened is that the players and owners have managed to anger the public and one another, and perhaps have done permanent damage to the major league baseball goose, which has been laying golden eggs for the past several years. What the coming season will bring remains a major question.

What it will not bring, or is not likely to bring, is a lockout or strike before the end of the World Series. The trauma of the past few months should have had a sobering enough impact on players, owners, and negotiators to keep anyone from reopening the wound.

Whether there will be a settlement is equally doubtful, although the pressures to settle have been intensified. The owners know that before they can declare an impasse again they must reappear before Judge Sotomayor, before whom they remain hitless. The players know that if they would walk again the public would never forgive them, and it is likely that many players would not walk a second time.

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