Daily Jolt: Gene Orza Biggest Villain of All

The Daily Jolt is a dose of baseball reality every weekday morning.

Baseball will carry on. It always does. If it can survive the fixing of the World Series, it can certainly survive the "revelation" that the once and future home run king juiced. That may not be what people want to hear as they huff and puff and blow indignantly about the shame Alex Rodriguez has brought upon the game and himself. But it is the truth.

Even as Barry Bonds, Mark McGwire and Roger Clemens have been unmasked, Major League Baseball has set attendance record after attendance record. Everyone talks tough, but at the end of the day, most of them wind up back at the ballpark

A-Rod will show up to Spring Training this weekend or perhaps a little later, and he will take a public beating. What else is new? There will be a ripple effect in the Bronx, of course, but baseball as a whole will move on quickly, assuming it hasn't already begun that process.

There just isn't much to be done.

Major League Baseball can not suspend Rodriguez because of the terms of the collective bargaining agreement. Asterisks, lifetime bans and other knee-jerk reactions are much too problematic. Rodriguez's punishment will come all the same, just in the public eye. Cooperstown is off the table. So is any hope of redemption for Rodriguez, even if he delivers a World Series title to the Bronx. For someone who is as neurotic, image-conscious and insecure as he is, that is probably punishment enough.

MLB has a drug testing policy in place that is competitive with other American professional sports. It's mistake was not having one until this decade, and that's a mistake that can not be undone and will not go away until every player who played before 2003 is out of the game. Even then, the dopers will always be one step ahead of the testers. (Seriously, how far away is gene therapy?) That's not a baseball problem, that's a modern sports problem.

There is one thing that should be done. Gene Orza, the chief operating officer of the Major League Baseball Players Association, should get his walking papers immediately. The most disturbing revelation in SI.com's report isn't that A-Rod tested positive for steroids, it's that Donald Fehr's partner in crime was his accomplice.

The news that Orza tipped off Rodriguez before he would be tested is damning, particularly since it syncs up with and provides independent confirmation of the facts in the Mitchell Report. It's made all the worse by the fact that the only reason that a list exists with the actual names of the 104 players who tested positive for steroids in 2003 is because of Orza's misguided attempts to prevent the implementation of a permanent drug testing program. (He hoped to prove that there were a number of false positives.)

It is one thing to fight against drug testing's inclusion in the collective bargaining agreement. There are at least privacy arguments to be made. It is entirely another to deliberately subvert a process designed to clean up the game once it was already agreed upon in the CBA. Not only did Orza betray the legal pact between the union and the owners, but, by creating the list in the first place, he also betrayed the players he was supposed to protect. Remember, the results of the 2003 testing were supposed to be entirely anonymous.

Short-sighted, filled with hubris and perhaps even a little incompetent? Gene Orza has got to go. Now. End of story.

That would be the biggest step taken toward fighting (can't say ridding the game with a straight face anymore) performance-enhancing drugs in the sport since the implementation of drug testing and, shortly thereafter, the stricter punishments for a positive test.

The saddest part of this all? One year after the Mitchell Report, the steroid era had finally begun to wind down. Mark McGwire is a recluse. Barry Bonds, out of baseball, will presumably join him once his upcoming trial is over. The same goes for Roger Clemens. Home runs are down. The Rays have turned themselves into winners by focusing on defense and team speed and much of baseball is following suit. The vestiges of the era were starting to fade.

Now, we're all imprisoned for nine more years -- the duration of A-Rod's current deal with the Yankees -- probably longer given that there are 103 names next to his on the list. Orza, Rodriguez and the federal officials who illegally leaked his name to Sports Illustrated have doomed us to nine more years of the same tiresome conversation we just had about Bonds as he chased down Hank Aaron, the same conversation we have every time the name McGwire shows up on the Hall of Fame ballot.

Who needs rational discourse anyway?

Once the season begins, this story will shift to the background, obscured by the play on the field. The fans will come back. But it will still lurk and linger. Rodriguez will be an even easier target for rowdy fans and righteous columnists alike. As for the rest of us -- those who know we'll never know for certain who did what when, nor will we ever be able to fully discern the precise impact of the drugs that were used -- we're still stuck in the echo chamber wondering when we'll really be able to move on.