NY Times: Testimony on Steroids in Baseball Is Questioned (RR)

When baseball and union officials appeared before the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform on March 17, 2005, they presented figures that showed that baseball’s two-year-old testing program had substantially reduced the number of positive tests for performance-enhancing drugs… The committee’s chairman, Henry A. Waxman, Democrat of California, has said he is troubled, and the committee’s staff is planning to send letters to Selig and Fehr seeking answers to what Waxman has called “misinformation.”

At the heart of the issue is the fact that the committee was not told that the 2004 testing, with its significantly lower positive test results, had been partly shut down for much of that season, what Selig’s office later called an emergency response to an unforeseen situation. Specifically, the shutdown arose from the federal investigation of the Bay Area Laboratory Co-operative steroid ring.
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“It’s clear that some of the information Major League Baseball and the players union gave the committee in 2005 was inaccurate,” Waxman said in a written statement. “It isn’t clear whether this was intentional or just reflects confusion over the testing program for 2003 and 2004. In any case, the misinformation is unacceptable.”
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“Congressional committees tend to give parties the benefit of the doubt if they are forthcoming and upfront about problems they may have,” said Deborah L. Rhode, a professor of law at Stanford University and the general counsel to the House Judiciary Committee during the impeachment hearing of President Clinton. “Like anything, it is always worse when other information comes out later.”