The World Anti-Doping Agency Has a Weird Thing for Major League Baseball

Somewhere in the last year, it became some sort of unwritten baseball-blogger rule that one agrees with Murray Chass at one's own peril. Columns decrying the use of statistics to measure performance, well, that'll get you blacklisted by blogs for life, or at the very least will get a few pixelated darts thrown your way.

But Chass has a good point in today's column about the World Anti-Doping Agency. That point? WADA would annoy us all less if they just kept quiet for a while:

"It depends on where you stick your stake in the ground about your values," he said in a recent telephone interview. "There were times when people paid money to see the lions fight the Christians. That doesn't mean it was right. It doesn't mean Major League Baseball values are right just because they're making millions of dollars."

"Major League Baseball can say, 'We're happy with what we're doing,' " he added.

"I'm not so certain society agrees with them."

That's David Howman, WADA official, speaking. It's not so bad that Howman wants to help reform MLB's drug testing policy. The policy needs reform. Even Bud Selig will admit that. No, this is so annoying because WADA has had their own share of failures in drug testing. Cycling is one of their former consultancies, after all; these are the people that can tell MLB what to do?

Major League Baseball is the guy that cheated on his taxes. WADA is the buddy scoffing at screaming at him to come clean. It might be right, but that doesn't mean it's not obnoxious.