Plenty of questions on why baseball would let A-Rod play. Simple answer is they benefit by being seen to follow due process.
— Danny Knobler (@DannyKnoblerCBS) August 5, 2013
Baseball has its best chance against drugs with majority of players and union on its side. Risking that would have been reckless and wrong.
— Danny Knobler (@DannyKnoblerCBS) August 5, 2013
No sense that due process is actually something that’s pretty cool and ignoring it would be reckless and wrong for its own sake. Merely that it would be a tactical mistake. “Being seen” as following due process is important. Due process itself? Eh, whatever.
This sense developed over the weekend that Major League Baseball had backed down or that Alex Rodriguez gained some tactical advantage in this big waltz. I’m not really sure about that. A-Rod is still gonna get hammered. He’ll get to play a bit before then, but he’s still going to be hit hard. The only reason we have that sense, I think, is because baseball and/or its surrogates overplayed their rhetorical hand for so long, talking as if suspending A-Rod under the CBA rather than the drug rules and thereby denying him appeal rights was somehow reasonable when it never was at all.
Oh well. My long-ago observation still holds: no one really cares about due process until process is due to them.
