Ex-Commish: Ban A-Rod Forever

Major League Baseball has just handed down some stiff suspensions to Alex Rodriguez and the other players implicated in the Biogenesis scandal—but not nearly stiff enough for Faye Vincent's tastes. When gambling threatened the sport, baseball instituted a one-strike-and-you're-out policy. "As a result, there is no gambling problem in baseball," Vincent observes in the Wall Street Journal. "The same punishment for a first-time drug violation is now warranted—one drug violation and a player is gone from the game, forever."

To Vincent, performance-enhancing drugs represent "an existential threat to all of competitive athletics. .. We cannot let things come to the point where the Yankees' success depends more on who their chemist is than on the quality of their pitching." As long as players can make tens of millions cheating, a 50- or 100-game suspension "may just seem like the cost of doing business." Rules are sacrosanct; without them, there's no game. If we condone cheating "we risk, quite literally, losing all our games." Click for Vincent's full piece.