Baseball: Drugs and money overshadow grand old game

It's supposed to be baseball's moment of innocent bliss - the annual All Star Game featuring the greatest players of National League and the American League, celebrating America's summer sporting pastime. This year though, the festivities which begin tonight at the Milwaukee Brewers' glistening new home of Miller Park will be decidedly forced.

Two shadows lie heavy over the grand old game, one chemical, calling into question the basic honesty of the spectacle, the other a dispute about money, pitting the players against the owners of the 30 major league franchises. And if the worst comes to the very worst, the outcome could conceivably be the death of top level professional baseball in its current format.

Understanding the labour dispute is beyond most ordinary mortals. It is about money – but who needs money in a game where the average annual player's salary is $2.3m (£1.5m), and the owners are mostly billionaires? Unless something is done, say the latter, baseball will go bankrupt – except that one of their number last year paid the small sum of $660m (£440m) for a single franchise, the Boston Red Sox. If baseball's bust, someone forgot to tell the Sox's new proprietors.

The owners insist they are being bled dry by wage demands: but who is it that bids up star salaries to today's ridiculous levels –the $252m 10-year deal secured by Alex Rodriguez of the Texas Rangers being but the most egregious example? The self-same owners.

The last time baseball went off the rails was in August 1994 when a players' strike wiped out the last five weeks of the regular season, and – for the first time since 1904 – the World Series. Eight years on and, to quote the the game's great folk sage Yogi Berra, it is "déjà vu all over again".

The issues, unresolved, are the same, the protagonists identical. And, many fear, the outcome will be the same as well. Yesterday the players' representatives were meeting in Chicago; if they did not set a strike date then, they are likely to do so in the very near future.

Heightening the sense of woe was the death last week of Ted Williams, a throwback to the heroic age before and after the Second World War. Arguably the greatest classic hitter in baseball history, in 1941 Williams became the last man to hit over .400 for a season, a peak that may never again be scaled.

What is more, Williams' feats are unchallengeable and for the ages. Not so today's records, when allegations about drug use have raised the suspicion that the modern home-run glut may owe as much to steroids as unadulterated athletic genius.

In 1998, the year he shattered the 37-year-old mark for home runs in a season, Mark McGwire confessed to using androstenedione, a performance-enhancing drug. "Andro" was legal. Now, however, baseball must reckon with the far more serious charges of the 1996 National League MVP, Ken Caminiti, that up to 50 per cent of hitters are juiced on steroids.

The disgrace is double. Not only has baseball (thanks in part to resistance from the players' union) set itself apart from most other sports, which ban steroids. But the drug rumours are polluting one of the game's enchantments, the constancy and sanctity of its statistics.

Was McGwire's 70-homer season in 1998 superior to Babe Ruth's 60 in 1927, when the only drugs of interest to the Bambino were alcohol and nicotine? And what of San Francisco's slugger Barry Bonds and his 73 homers last year: a thrilling late career surge by a 36-year-old or something more sinister?

All the basic problems remain. The owners have a point when they say that something must be done to correct the revenue inequalities that make it harder and harder to compete. Attendances are down 6 per cent, in part perhaps because most of the teams are perceived as also-rans.

Just like the Premiership in English football, only a handful of wealthy clubs have a genuine chance of winning the World Series. For Manchester United read the New York Yankees, winners of five straight Series between 1996 and 2000. Just as in the Premiership, the gap between the haves and have-nots grows steadily wider.

Bud Selig, baseball's Commissioner, wants to make the major leagues more competitive by forcing the super-rich to share revenue with the poorer, and by taxing excessive payrolls. He also believes that at least two of the weaker franchises should be folded.

But for the players' union, the owners' bleatings are no more than that, and the proposals add up to a salary cap by another name; it vows to fight them now as fiercely as in 1994. Stir in gallons of bad blood and reciprocal mistrust, and it makes for a pretty bleak prospect. And for a less than joyous All-Star Game.