Saturday, March 20, 2010

Jeff Passan - Doper's Apologist

Saturday March 20, 2010

Ready. Start. Rant.

Jeff Passan - Doper’s apologist.

Everytime there is an announcement of another player caught doping, Another player caught using a PED. Passan defends them.

Everytime the powers that be want to do more to get rid of cheaters and criminals in the game of baseball, Passan defends cheating.

You have to wonder why.

His positions are untenable at best. He is called out time and again. And he is always on the wrong side of what is right and good. He always come out on the side of the evil doers, the cheaters, the criminals.

And most of the time his facts are wrong. Its one thing to defend an action if your facts are straight, but Passan doesn’t do his due diligence before spouting off.

He just consistently says “its ok to dope, to cheat, to be a criminal and here are my specious reasons why”.

His latest article is entitled Pure Nonsense, which is exactly what his article is. Pure nonsense.

He tries to say that WADA is some obscure organization with no standing, even though they are the organization that polices virtually ALL other professional and sports world wide.

He tries to say that the Blood tests remain in question, even though there is 12 YEARS of evidence of their validity and efficacy. There are 12 years of lab testing that show that it works.  And the tests did not become commercially available until 2008, so there was no out of season testing or unannounced visits that use the test because of its great unavailability and expense prior to 2010.

He tries to say it never caught anyone at the Olympics so its obviously ineffective, because in Passan’s world we KNOW all Olympic athletes use HGH.

The more rational argument is that it was SO effective in testing that Olympic athletes have moved on to other kinds of doping or have become cleaner as a group. That is not the side of the argument Passan chose to take. In Passan's world ALL athletes cheat. That is a given to him.

At the recent Winter Olympics only 30 of 2600 athletes were denied competition for testing positive for ANY banned substance or for missing a test. Almost ALL of those positives were for cold medicine.

Did Passan the Doping Apologist stop to think that maybe the athletes have stopped doping as much because the tests are so good today?

NOPE! He took an illogical leap of faith and tried to say that because there were no positive results, that the testing is faulty.

Far from it. International athletes are tested year round on a random basis and without advance notice. They want to continue competing and they know the tests are very accurate so they have simply stopped doing doping that can be tested for, and HGH can be tested for and has been for 6 years.

Passan tries to say that money is the organizations only motivation even though they are a non profit that was in the red in 2009 because of the cost of administering a world wide anti doping testing program.

Once again, Passan gets his facts wrong, while defending athletes that are cheating the game and breaking the law.

Yes HGH is against the law without a DR’s prescription, just like steroids.

Yes HGH use is against the rules of the game of baseball.

But Passan pushes forward with some ridiculous idea that just because they are athletes that they have some inalienable right to cheat.

I’m sorry. Any company can demand that its employees take any type of drug testing they see fit. Either submit to the testing or work elsewhere.

The same stands for baseball players. They are employees of a company and they should have to take any test that does not endanger their health or ability to play the game to see that they are not breaking those rules.

A little pin prick is not career threatening and they are taking a blood sample is ALREADY required of all MLB athletes, so why should testing that blood for HGH be such an issue?

The fact is, unless you are in favor of cheating and criminal actions by your employees, there should be NO argument against it. Passan tried once again to make just such a spurious argument and once again he failed.

He should really get his priorities straight. Obviously he is against people who do things the right way and in favor of those who are cheating or he would not so consistently argue that doing anything to try to weed out the cheats and criminals is bad.

Passan is a joke. I guess that is why he writes for Yahoo and not The Globe or even ESPN.