Texas Manager Admits Cocaine Use in 2009

[McNulty]

This thread is nothing if not hilarious.

[byrdz]

To add to Lucky Jim's post, isn't one of the obvious explanations that he started taking it because he was stressed out by the manager's job and thought it might help him get more stuff done?

I'm sorry but that drug seems like the last thing you'd want to be doing if you were stressed. Smoking and drinking I can understand but this is a completely different ballgame. No pun intended.

[RShack]

I don't even know what this is talking about Shack. Not the world as I've ever seen it. And not Ron Washington's situation, either.

There's nothing "simplistic" about my take on this. What "private" company is doing "snooping dirty work" on behalf of the government here? Your hypotheticals are irrelevant to any of the actual issues at stake.

Oh, wait - you're not actually talking about this, but instead going off on the anti-corporatist screed that most of us hoped wouldn't happen. Ah, well.

Also, the bolded part is at best unevidence and at worst willfully disingenuous. I never said that, nor did I imply it.

I should know better than to engage you on these issues. Because you can't be engaged any more than a gun can be "engaged." Instead, you both just go off. And, indeed, the effect of your posts on these subjects is like that of a gun going off in a car. Disruptive at a minimum, and often times fatal to the thread.

I love it when you pretend to speak for "most of us".

All I said was that I think there should be explicit privacy rights related to info about us. That is not a radical position, it's a perfectly reasonable opinion, no matter how you try to paint it otherwise. Just because you don't agree with it, that doesn't mean it's radical. The only reason I even said that is because you said that employers demanding drug tests "is fine". Any further commentary is just my response to people making it sound like the Constitution sanctions corporate snooping. It doesn't sanction it, it just doesn't address it either way, because it wasn't an issue back then.

If you don't think personal privacy is under threat these days, you're just not paying attention.

The issue here is not an isolated one that just affects MLB people. It arises every day, and it affects millions of people. To reduce the basic privacy issue to nothing but people's illegal drug use is naive. You can use whatever pejorative and dismissive labels you want, it doesn't change the fact that personal privacy is under threat these days like it never has been before. Now, if you want to adopt the Ostrich Strategy about it, that's up to you. But pretending that everyone's privacy status has not been dramatically eroded in recent years is simply ignoring reality.

[TGO]

I'm sorry but that drug seems like the last thing you'd want to be doing if you were stressed. Smoking and drinking I can understand but this is a completely different ballgame. No pun intended.

Stressed may have been the wrong word. What I meant was maybe he felt he needed some sort of upper. Crack is much too addictive. And meth is just so white trash.

I'm not saying he made a good decision.

Don't do drugs, kids.

[TGO]

I love it when you pretend to speak for "most of us".

All I said was that I think there should be explicit privacy rights related to info about us. That is not a radical position, no matter how you try to paint it otherwise. The only reason I even said that is because you said that employers demanding drug tests "is fine". Any further commentary is just my response to people making it sound like the Constitution sanctions corporate snooping. It doesn't sanction it, it just doesn't address it either way, because it wasn't an issue back then.

If you don't think personal privacy is under threat these days, you're just not paying attention.

The issue here is not an isolated one that just affects MLB people. It arises every day, and it effects millions of people. To reduce the basic privacy issue to nothing but people's illegal drug use is naive. You can use whatever pejorative and dismissive labels you want, it doesn't change the fact that personal privacy is under threat these days like it never has been before. Now, if you want to adopt the Ostrich Strategy about it, that's up to you. But pretending that everyone's privacy status has not been dramatically eroded in recent years is simply ignoring reality.

LJ is right, most of us don't want to read your opinions on corporations and personal privacy.

It's a worthwhile discussion but not one that should take place on the MLB board or anywhere on this forum at all IMO.

[RShack]

LJ is right, most of us don't want to read your opinions on corporations and personal privacy.

It's a worthwhile discussion but not one that should take place on the MLB board or anywhere on this forum at all IMO.

Well, I can see your point about that. But if you look at what actually happened here, the basic story is that it's somehow fine to assert that we should not have privacy rights, but it is somehow controversial to say we should. Now, I think it's fine to stay away from controversial issues that extend beyond baseball. But that's rather different than saying that people like LJ who assert one position should be immune from disagreement. If we're not going to discuss controversial issues, that should be a 2-way street, not a 1-way street where people get to assert one position and then claim it is inappropriate to disagree with the point of view they favor.

[Lucky Jim]

LJ is right, most of us don't want to read your opinions on corporations and personal privacy.

It's a worthwhile discussion but not one that should take place on the MLB board or anywhere on this forum at all IMO.

Exactly.

Letters.

[twoBshorty]

I'm sorry but that drug seems like the last thing you'd want to be doing if you were stressed. Smoking and drinking I can understand but this is a completely different ballgame. No pun intended.

If you mix it with heroin it becomes much more pleasant. So I've heard.

Anyone who is really into privacy law debates should head on over to the Consumerist blog and get involved in one of the weekly arguments about receipt checking at Walmart. Guaranteed to balloon to 200+ posts every time.

[BRobinsonfan]

LJ is right, most of us don't want to read your opinions on corporations and personal privacy.

It's a worthwhile discussion but not one that should take place on the MLB board or anywhere on this forum at all IMO.

RShack, unlike TGO I haven't taken a survey to determine what most of the board wants/doesn't want.

Other people brought up the issue of whether he should be fired, how the military would have handled this, how other players were treated in similar situations and a whole host of issues.

I am not offended, put off, threatened or otherwise discouraged from participation in this thread by your thoughts on personal privacy. But obviously, if the results of survey's taken by others are accurate, I'm in the minority.

[Lucky Jim]

Well, I can see your point about that. But if you look at what actually happened here, the basic story is that it's somehow fine to assert that we should not have privacy rights, but it is somehow controversial to say we should. Now, I think it's fine to stay away from controversial issues that extend beyond baseball. But that's rather different than saying that people who assert one position should be immune from disagreement. If we're not going to discuss controversial issues, that should be a 2-way street, not a 1-way street.

Laughable. This is just a bunch of revisionist claptrap w/ no connection to reality.

I never said anything is "immune from disagreement." I said that this situation has nothing to do with the big picture issues you're obsessed with. And trying to shoehorn that big picture into this story is - wholly - simplistic. It ignores all nuance and resorts to empty and/or shallow defintions of public, of private, and of "invasion."

And, again, no one said anyone "shouldn't" or "doesn't" have privacy rights. Here are all the posts on the issue. You can point out any sweeping statements erasing the right to privacy.

Testing for roids is relevant to baseball. You might agree or disagree, but there is a plausible case that PED's affect the integrity of the game on the field.

Testing for recreational drugs is nothing but a public image thing for MLB. The idea that somebody who smokes pot or does the a line of coke on their own time is giving themselves an unfair advantage on the field is absurd. A manager never performs at playing baseball anyway. This is all about MLB's public image, and has nothing to do with the game itself.

If the team wants to fire the manager over this, they certainly can do so. But let's be clear about what the reason would be: he put them in a PR-bind that maybe makes the team look bad. That's pretty much all there is to it. Let's not confuse that with some great moral issue. It's not like the guy did anything to hurt anybody else. A lot of the noise here is about people jumping on the Demon Drug bandwagon, which is largely fact-free and makes about as much sense as the Salem Witch trials. It's just about the image of a profitable industry and the steps they take to manage their image. It has nothing to do with baseball.

This post breaks down under the weight of its own contradictions. How am I saying that I'm somehow above "mere mortals" by defending Washington because he is, essentially, human (i.e., flawed, prone to lapses in judgment, etc.) My position on this is the "mortal" one, refusing some Manichaen, rigid, and/or binary take on the issue of a single failed drug test.

It's entirely possible that I'm more lenient than others, and that leniency has been conditioned by work environments where high achieving individuals are given leeway to fail, at times, because their talents make the risk worthwhile. This was especially true in graduate school (where I was one of the ones given a second chance) and is even true at my law firm. There's a limit to that tolerance. But that limit isn't a single failed drug test.

As Shack noted, drug tests for recreational drugs are meant to feret out private behavior. And that's fine. But this doesn't appear to be a case where Washington's use was so pervasive and encompassing that it spilled out into the world - he didn't get picked up with it in his car, get caught using it in a club, etc. It's a bad habit, and it needed to stop. But if people popped up at random times to check on most of us, they'd probably catch us doing something we're ashamed of eventually.

I don't think it's fine. I think it's the opposite of fine. It's just another case of why we need some civil liberties protections that apply to more than just the government, that apply to corporate snooping too. Unless somebody is in some special kind of job, like flying the public around on airplanes or doing some national security thing, I don't think employers should be snooping around in everybody's bodily fluids or in other aspects of their private lives. They never used to do that, it's only a very recent thing. America became a superpower and wrote the book on success without this kind of nonsense. It's not like the success of our society is tied to letting corporations do whatever they want, just because they want to. People should have privacy rights, and not just from the government. There needs to be some "need to know" basis that justifies snooping around in the private lives of everybody...

They do have a way of avoiding it. Don't take the job. I think your take on this is just as simplistic as those who are overly invasive and/or overly draconian. Clearly this kind of behavior exists on a continuum. And while some areas have tighter restrictions than others, due to issues of public perception, in this case there's clearly a trade-off. For Washington, the prestige and salary are clearly worth the trade-off in privacy. Freedom of contract goes both ways. Here, Washington is, essentially, contracting with MLB. And he's determined that the loss of privacy is worth the gain in other areas.

But it's really simple to avoid it: do something else. This isn't a case of corporate snooping. Nor is it the right place for another "anti-corporatist" screed. This is a contract entered into, with conditions, by two parties. That's pretty much the definition of civil liberty. It's not a one-way street. There are two private bodies at issue here, each with their own preferences.

BTW, I didn't say that you think it's fine, if that's your issue. Those are two separate sentences. One in which I note your point, one in which I make my own.

That's the standard excuse for nixing any employee rights with respect to private behavior. It's also a vacuous one. It's pretty much a "love it or leave it" answer to a very real and complex issue. That's what's 'simplistic".

Your claim that it's 'simplistic" to say there needs to be some kind of criteria for violating personal privacy is itself an extremist position. I never said what the criteria should be, I just said there needs to be some kind of reasonable criteria. Evidently, you think there should be no criteria, that whatever the employer wants to know about somebody's private life is fine, and they can snoop around in a person's body all they want.

That's about as simplistic and extreme as you can get. It also provides a way around civil liberties, as it enables the gov't to just have a private company do it's snooping dirty work for them. So much for personal privacy. Evidently, "Land of the Free" means "Land of no-more-privacy, Land of letting companies do whatever they want, and if people don't like their privacy being violated, well, too bad". It's equivalent to saying, "You're not required to give up your privacy... unless you want to eat..."

It's not 1787 anymore. The threats to personal privacy are way different now than they were then. As it is, existing databases can be used to track your personal behavior to an extreme degree. Every thing you buy (unless you use cash), every call you make (unless you use public pay phones, which are disappearing), every location you visit (unless you turn your cell phone off). Furthermore, the gov't can acquire all this, just by buying it from the private sector. I can't believe so many people think it's fine to not have decent rules about our personal privacy. It's not crazy or extreme to say that info about you should belong to you, not to whoever owns comprehensive data-sweep operations...

I don't even know what this is talking about Shack. Not the world as I've ever seen it. And not Ron Washington's situation, either.

There's nothing "simplistic" about my take on this. What "private" company is doing "snooping dirty work" on behalf of the government here? Your hypotheticals are irrelevant to any of the actual issues at stake.

Oh, wait - you're not actually talking about this, but instead going off on the anti-corporatist screed that most of us hoped wouldn't happen. Ah, well.

Also, the bolded part is at best unevidence and at worst willfully disingenuous. I never said that, nor did I imply it.

I should know better than to engage you on these issues. Because you can't be engaged any more than a gun can be "engaged." Instead, you both just go off. And, indeed, the effect of your posts on these subjects is like that of a gun going off in a car. Disruptive at a minimum, and often times fatal to the thread.

I love it when you pretend to speak for "most of us".

All I said was that I think there should be explicit privacy rights related to info about us. That is not a radical position, it's a perfectly reasonable opinion, no matter how you try to paint it otherwise. Just because you don't agree with it, that doesn't mean it's radical. The only reason I even said that is because you said that employers demanding drug tests "is fine". Any further commentary is just my response to people making it sound like the Constitution sanctions corporate snooping. It doesn't sanction it, it just doesn't address it either way, because it wasn't an issue back then.

If you don't think personal privacy is under threat these days, you're just not paying attention.

The issue here is not an isolated one that just affects MLB people. It arises every day, and it affects millions of people. To reduce the basic privacy issue to nothing but people's illegal drug use is naive. You can use whatever pejorative and dismissive labels you want, it doesn't change the fact that personal privacy is under threat these days like it never has been before. Now, if you want to adopt the Ostrich Strategy about it, that's up to you. But pretending that everyone's privacy status has not been dramatically eroded in recent years is simply ignoring reality.

Well, I can see your point about that. But if you look at what actually happened here, the basic story is that it's somehow fine to assert that we should not have privacy rights, but it is somehow controversial to say we should. Now, I think it's fine to stay away from controversial issues that extend beyond baseball. But that's rather different than saying that people like LJ who assert one position should be immune from disagreement. If we're not going to discuss controversial issues, that should be a 2-way street, not a 1-way street where he gets to assert one position but nobody gets to disagree.

Clearly, my point is that - in this case - Washington chose to waive or abnegate any privacy preference. If you don't think it's within the rights of an individual to do that, when contracting, or within the rights of a company to do that, when contracting, then you're trying to limit "liberty" more than anyone else here. If you're talking about other things - miasmic and/or undefined instances of "snooping" - then you're off-topic and your posts are irrelevant.

[TyCobb]

LJ is right, most of us don't want to read your opinions on corporations and personal privacy.

It's a worthwhile discussion but not one that should take place on the MLB board or anywhere on this forum at all IMO.

I would have rep LJ if I could.

Doesn't Coke stay in the system for like 24 hours? What are the odds the only time he did it, he had a drug test the next day?

Has Washington ever heard of a Red Bull?

[RShack]

Laughable....

[lots of stuff deleted]

Clearly, my point is that - in this case - Washington chose to waive or abnegate any privacy preference. If you don't think it's within the rights of an individual to do that, when contracting, or within the rights of a company to do that, when contracting, then you're trying to limit "liberty" more than anyone else here. If you're talking about other things - miasmic and/or undefined instances of "snooping" - then you're off-topic and your posts are irrelevant.

I have one question: Why is it OK for you to repeatedly argue what you think is right, but it's somehow wrong for those who disagree with you to say what they think is right? Do you really think you are smarter/better/more entitled than people who disagree with you? There should be one rule for those who agree with you, but a different rule for those who don't?

[TyCobb]

I have one question: Why is it OK for you to repeatedly argue what you think is right, but it's somehow wrong for those who disagree with you to say what they think is right? Do you really think you are smarter/better/more entitled than people who disagree with you?

His post are short. We could live with you ideas, if they didn't take so long to read.

[Lucky Jim]

I have one question: Why is it OK for you to repeatedly argue what you think is right, but it's somehow wrong for those who disagree with you to say what they think is right? Do you really think you are smarter/better/more entitled than people who disagree with you?

I don't know what you're talking about. Truly. All I've said is that a discussion of "corporate" invasion of individual privacy is irrelevant in this instance, where we're dealing with highly lucrative contracts involving highly specialized skill sets.

I haven't commented in any substantive way on any underlying point. At all. I've kept my posts focused on THIS case. Have you? And if you haven't, how am I even disagreeing with you?

So, you know, bugger off.

[RShack]

His post are short. We could live with you ideas, if they didn't take so long to read.

You think post #52 is long? ;-)

That's where I said what I think. For some reason, it triggered a bunch of opposition. Now, maybe you agree with what I said, or maybe you don't, but it's not crazy or extreme. (Nor is it long.)

I don't see why it's a big deal for me to state my opinion when various others are giving their opinions about what the story should be about the manager in question. What it boils down to is that some folks think it's fine for people to give opinions they happen to agree with, but it's not fine to give alternate opinions...