The message is clear: baseball players should suffer for their mistakes, but teams shouldn’t suffer for their own
It’s not often you see a Major League Baseball team throw a temper tantrum in public – so pay attention to the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim over the next few weeks. Behind their anger lurks one of the next battlegrounds for labor relations in baseball.
The man of the hour, of course, is Josh Hamilton. The details are familiar by now: Hamilton, the 34-year-old superstar outfielder who the Angels signed to a five-year, $125m contract with $83m still remaining on the deal, self-reported a relapse in his recovery from alcohol and cocaine addiction directly to the league office earlier this year. He did not fail a drug test, either before or after reporting his own relapse. After some deliberation, a panel was convened by Major League Baseball to determine Hamilton’s punishment. That panel deadlocked, and an outside arbitrator had to be brought in. The arbitrator found that Hamilton had not violated the terms of the Joint Drug Agreement or the Collective Bargaining Agreement – the two binding documents that lay out the league’s drug policy for players – and thus could not be suspended.
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from Sport | The Guardian http://ift.tt/1crARsB

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