Marvin Miller Calls Steroid Testing a 'Witch Hunt'

Marvin Miller, the iconic former head of the Major League Baseball Players Association, hurled some serious invective at Major League Baseball, the federal government, current union leadership and the media for their roles in what he termed a "witch hunt" aimed at professional athletes.

Miller defended the union's decision not to destroy the 2003 urine test results that resulted in Alex Rodriguez's outing as a steroid user, but, during an interview with ESPN.com, said that he would never have allowed the tests to be done in the first place.

"There's no evidence that's plausible to justify testing people indiscriminately. If the government wanted to do that, they'd have to go to court for each player tested and say, 'Here's evidence of probable cause that this player is a user of an illegal product.' "

Miller was just getting warmed up.

He accused the media of perpetuating steroid use among kids by calling them "performance enhancers." In his estimation, that indicates that one need do nothing more than use steroids to become the next Barry Bonds or Roger Clemens, which comes off as both a massive oversimplification and an insightful point about the role the media has played in stoking the steroid era.

Of course, Miller also believes that there's no such thing as a performance-enhancing drug in the first place. Players believe that they enhance performance, so they take them, but Miller doesn't buy the notion that they actually help anything. Unsurprisingly, he doesn't believe that they pose a health risk, either, and calls the government hypocritical for criminalizing them while keeping tobacco legal.

It is hard to think of anything more hypocritical than the way the government criminalizes some substances while keeping tobacco and alcohol legal. That's not going to bring anyone around to Miller's way of thinking, however. He comes across as the old-school union man that he is, born in a time when employees were far more taken advantage of than they are today.

The current MLBPA is partners with MLB in a way that didn't exist when Miller was running the show. Whatever the scientific facts of steroid use, they are perceived as being bad for the body and unfair for the game. It is firmly in the best interests of both sides to make sure the game is seen as clean by the consumers who are filling their wallets. The individual rights of the players, in this case, have become less important than the collective good, a point of view Miller wouldn't be caught dead espousing.