After letting all these BALCO steroid headlines sink in for a few days, it’s occurred to me how similar it all is to some of the other high profile corporate scandals of the past few years.
Baseball, like any professional sport in the U.S. is big business. Millions and millions of dollars change hands every year due to baseball. The fact that some players broke the law to gain a competitive edge doesn’t surprise me at all. By breaking the law and taking steroids, they upped their statistics, which garnered them a bigger paycheck. Their bosses probably turned a blind-eye to this too because the better the player’s statistics, the more people sit in the stands and buy apparel which in turn raises everyone’s salary in the organization.
It seems pretty cut and dried to me. They broke the law to gain a competitve advantage. That’s what folks at Enron did. That’s what Martha Stewart did. That’s what numerous other company personnel are doing right now in many other companies; they just haven’t been caught yet.
Until big business learns some morality, I fear we will have to weather quite a few of these storms. I wonder these days if capitalism and morality can even coexist at all.
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