"Larger and Darker By the Day"

By Tom Callahan

Simplifying baseball's drug crisis, leaving out the weasel words anyway, Commissioner Peter Ueberroth made a direct plea to every major league player last week to volunteer for urinalysis. Throughout an unusual address, as amazing as any ever delivered in the cause of image repair, alarm bells were ringing: "Baseball is on trial." "Baseball is in trouble." "A cloud called drugs is permeating our game." "The shadow is growing larger and darker by the day." "Stop this menace." At risk and at stake are "a generation of kids" and "a decade of baseball being synonymous with drugs." "We cannot let the season conclude without attacking the problem." "This is baseball's last chance."

Regarding seven immunized witnesses and several slandered bystanders, exhibits from a cocaine trial that seems to have been conducted on an iceberg tip in Pittsburgh, Ueberroth has been straining under what he termed a "great demand to do something Landis-like." Maybe to reassure the players of his sympathy, maybe to indicate that it has limits, he found a temperate quote from baseball's original commissioner, whose swift justice expelled the 1919 "Black Sox" fixers. "I want every player to feel I stand behind him," Judge Landis had asserted, and here Ueberroth's voice acquired an edge, "so long as he is on the square." He has suspended only the matter of punishment "for the time being."

That melodramatic phrase "baseball's last chance" refers to House and Senate pressures and the specter of hearings and legislation. Then "baseball will have lost control of its own problems," warned Ueberroth, a concern to everyone who holds the laws of the leagues dearer than the laws of the land. Purely by congressional whim does baseball remain set off from all the other professional sports as being somehow special. While the National Football League suffers, and generally loses, one antitrust suit after another, major league baseball enjoys an antitrust exemption.

Bypassing both the owners and the union chiefs, Ueberroth wrote to each athlete individually, in plain desperation. But the Players Association acted quickly to forestall him. A few of the enclosed ballots were immediately filled out, and whole teams opted for testing--Pittsburgh Manager Chuck Tanner made the Pirates vote. However, everyone eventually attached a rider requiring the accord of their union. It was not forthcoming. Acting Executive Director Donald Fehr called Ueberroth's appeal silly and suggested that the commissioner was out to make personal news, presumably to some political benefit. Ueberroth said that he was prompted by a number of major league players who actually applied to join the minor leaguers in a mandatory testing program now four months along. Whether there are enough to spur the union now is the question. Because by week's end Ueberroth's deadline for responses expired, and he was beaten back into the dismal channels of collective bargaining. Though not cleaving to every comma in the limited testing agreement already in place, Fehr seems unlikely to sway very far from the standard principles of a free society, where ballplayers are as receptive as most workers to mass indictments and virtue detectors.

Ueberroth would monitor only illegal substances, dismissing prescription drugs like amphetamines, not to mention alcohol. As if arguing for old ways, New York Yankees Manager Billy Martin continues to hold forth in bars against strangers and starters alike, though one-handed since breaking his arm in a tangle with Pitcher Ed Whitson. Plastered to the elbow, Martin stopped by the Copacabana last week (which is a little like Janet Leigh going back into the shower), and each was surprised to find the other standing. Baseball also remains erect somehow. The players shamed in Pittsburgh have more than weathered the disgrace. Keith Hernandez of the New York Mets returned from the courthouse to Shea Stadium (and the pennant race) to an ovation.

At least in the case of Hernandez, a splendid first baseman, the compassion was exorbitant. The pitiful way he finally told the truth about his cocaine years did not match the virulent way he used to lie. In 1984, following a brief term as head of the Players Association, former Federal Mediator Kenneth Moffett recoiled at the drug scene and indiscreetly mentioned a couple of suspicious trades, including Hernandez' transfer from St. Louis. Denying just the implication of the truth was not enough for Hernandez, who furiously threatened a suit until Moffett eventually backed down in a humiliating public ceremony that Hernandez required. A few weeks ago, when Hernandez was apologizing to Mets fans, his agent was apologizing to Moffett. There is a test for the presence of drugs. There is none for an absence of character.

Bowing to no sport in the variety of its slums, college football displayed its own excesses last week. At Columbia University, the Ivy League for heaven's sake, Coach Jim Garrett defamed his team after a 49-17 loss to Harvard and castigated his punter in a manner too callous even for the pros, which now includes Texas Christian University. Counting himself among more than 50 T.C.U. alumni bagmen, Oil Tycoon Dick Lowe last week acknowledged his part in the purchase of 29 Horned Frog players since 1980. For a "blue chip" running back, Lowe described the going rate as $10,000 to $25,000 down, $1,000 a month and a new car. Six T.C.U. players have been suspended, among them All- America Running Back Kenneth Davis, a fifth-year senior who passed up the N.F.L. draft last time in a forlorn dream of winning the Heisman trophy. "They make us look like the rats, gnawing away," he told the Washington Post. "But they put the cheese out there for us."