Sport: Larger and Darker By the Day

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Simplifying baseball's drug crisis, leaving out the weasel words anyway, Commissioner Peter Ueberroth made a direct plea to every major league player last week to volunteer for urinalysis. Throughout an unusual address, as amazing as any ever delivered in the cause of image repair, alarm bells were ringing: "Baseball is on trial." "Baseball is in trouble." "A cloud called drugs is permeating our game." "The shadow is growing larger and darker by the day." "Stop this menace." At risk and at stake are "a generation of kids" and "a decade of baseball being synonymous with drugs." "We cannot let the season conclude without attacking the problem." "This is baseball's last chance."

Regarding seven immunized witnesses and several slandered bystanders, exhibits from a cocaine trial that seems to have been conducted on an iceberg tip in Pittsburgh, Ueberroth has been straining under what he termed a "great demand to do something Landis-like." Maybe to reassure the players of his sympathy, maybe to indicate that it has limits, he found a temperate quote from baseball's original commissioner, whose swift justice expelled the 1919 "Black Sox" fixers. "I want every player to feel I stand behind him," Judge Landis had asserted, and here Ueberroth's voice acquired an edge, "so long as he is on the square." He has suspended only the matter of punishment "for the time being."

That melodramatic phrase "baseball's last chance" refers to House and Senate pressures and the specter of hearings and legislation. Then "baseball will have lost control of its own problems," warned Ueberroth, a concern to everyone who holds the laws of the leagues dearer than the laws of the land. Purely by congressional whim does baseball remain set off from all the other professional sports as being somehow special. While the National Football League suffers, and generally loses, one antitrust suit after another, major league baseball enjoys an antitrust exemption.

Bypassing both the owners and the union chiefs, Ueberroth wrote to each athlete individually, in plain desperation. But the Players Association acted quickly to forestall him. A few of the enclosed ballots were immediately filled out, and whole teams opted for testing--Pittsburgh Manager Chuck Tanner made the Pirates vote. However, everyone eventually attached a rider requiring the accord of their union. It was not forthcoming. Acting Executive Director Donald Fehr called Ueberroth's appeal silly and suggested that the commissioner was out to make personal news, presumably to some political benefit. Ueberroth said that he was prompted by a number of major league players who actually applied to join the minor leaguers in a mandatory testing program now four months along. Whether there are enough to spur the union now is the question. Because by week's end Ueberroth's deadline for responses expired, and he was beaten back into the dismal channels of collective bargaining. Though not cleaving to every comma in the limited testing agreement already in place, Fehr seems unlikely to sway very far from the standard principles of a free society, where ballplayers are as receptive as most workers to mass indictments and virtue detectors.