Friday, July 31, 2009

Baseball's Anonymous Testing

The "leaking" of the names of Manny Ramirez and David Ortiz yesterday from the now legendary and infamous 2003 list made me stop and think again about the whole idea. I realize that I am not nearly as intelligent as the leaders of MLB of MLBPA, so I must be missing something. What I don't understand is how an "anonymous" test would even have a name associated with it in the first place. Again, I am probably just a stupid fan, but if I had been running the 2003 test, when I said it would be anonymous, I would have made sure that there was no way a name could ever be associated with a given sample.

Since there was no penalty at the time, no player tested needed to try and hide anything. I don't know exactly how the testing was administered, but here is a general idea of how my really anonymous testing would have gone. Have the players gather in the locker room. They all give a sample. All the samples are given to someone who has no idea what sample is what. They randomly choose one or two samples and toss the rest. At this point no one, not even the people giving the sample would know let alone the sampling testers, unless of course you were going to do some kind of DNA testing for the purpose of finding out. These samples are still not even labeled or marked or anything. They are put in a container that is identical to the container that this same sample set is being put in at every other team facility. These completely unidentifiable samples are gathered together in completely unidentifiable containers to make the sample test. The testing is done and we get our 104 positives. But who would ever know which individual was related to it?

Obviously there was something very wrong with the "sort of anonymous" test from the very beginning if an individual's name could ever in any way be associated with his sample. It is obviously NOT an anonymous test.

No comments:

Post a Comment