Posted By:
davidcyclebackA question is when many of these players have medical problems 30 years from now will they sue MLB and the Players Union for hundreds of millions of dollars for their ailments? My guess is players will turn around and sue baseball, including their union, for being to lax about drug use. This report can be used as evidence, stating both sides were lax-- in particular when comparing to Olympic sports identified and seriously addressed the problem decades before (Remember, Ben Johnson was tested and banned almost 30 years ago). One of the pressing issues for the Olympics is that steroids and similar banned drugs cause major health problems in 1980s Communist troubles. MLB and the Players' Union heads had to have been well aware of the horrendous health problems many East German athletes developed from using the same drugs baseball was 'being lax' about. If the drug use leads to similar health problems, including early death, baseball may have a huge financial liability down the road.
In a case, jurors would address MLB's liability in part by comparing it to how other contemporary sports addressed, if they addressed, the issue. That's part of how a jury determines if an company was doing what a reasonable company would and should do-- by comparing it's practices to what other companies in the same field were doing at the same time. If every other propane storage company was known to follow a well recognized safety practice, and your company chose not to-- the comparison of practices between companies will be used as evidence if your lack of practice leads to injury or death. That the Olympics, which included the sport of baseball by the way, had addressed the issue with testing and penalties literally decades earlier, may prove to be a damning comparison for baseball. Again, this would be reinforced by MLB's own commissioned report that states baseball was lax and probably should have been used the accepted practices long used other sports like the Olympics.