FanHouse WADA

It's amazing how much "no comment" can say. I've made a pet project of the curious case of Yanina Wickmayer, the young tennis player banned for a year from the tour for a doping offense even though she never missed a doping test and never failed one.

Wickmayer is being punished for Andre Agassi's sins. That's how tennis is trying to save face, by crushing a 20-year old budding star who seems to have committed, at worst, a tiny infraction.

I've spent the past few weeks calling and emailing the doping agencies and governing bodies involved. You name the initials, VDT, WADA, WTA, ITF.

Most of them are B.S. In the end, this isn't even about Wickmayer anymore. It's about doping tests and steroids in sports in general. We need watchers to keep an eye on the cheating athletes.

But who is watching the watchers?

Now that greenies -- those helpful little methamphetamines that make a 162-game season just fly by! -- are actually being taken seriously by Major League Baseball, players are going alternate routes to get their slight competitive advantage.

What? You didn't think they would play the season without some sort of stimulant, right? Sometimes, Red Bull isn't enough.

So baseball players are rushing to their doctors to get prescribed for ADHD, and the numbers are finally in on that little stunt: About seven percent of professional baseball players are diagnosed with ADD and are getting the drugs to prove it; about one to three percent of the U.S. populace is diagnosed with the same condition.

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.