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New Web Site's Purpose Is To End The Steroid Era In Baseball

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By Carter Gaddis, The Tampa Tribune

Published: February 13, 2008

Leo McNellis is not a sports demagogue; he just plays one on the Internet. By day, he's a chemistry teacher at Washington High in South Bend, Ind., and an avowed Cubs fan. Yet, when McNellis, 41, became fed up with what he perceived was a lack of voice being given to baseball fans in the conversation about the abuse of performance enhancing drugs, he decided to act by founding the Web site, fanstrike.net.

It's not as radical as it sounds. McNellis acknowledges up front that he never would dream of asking fans to stop going to games or watching on TV; might as well ask the wind not to blow at Wrigley Field. What he does suggest, however, is that fans make manifest their disapproval with the way baseball and its players have handled PED by taking economic action - some subtle, some overt.

The goal? Let the shepherds of the game know that they don't operate in a vacuum, that what they do and how they do it is being watch closely by the customers, and that those customers don't appreciate having to endure a tainted product.

Two days after McNellis launched his Web site last week, he began to get the word out by sending introductory e-mails to baseball writers around the country. That led to this conversation with The Tampa Tribune:

What compelled you to do take this stand?

Obviously, I'm a big baseball fan. The idea came to mind in that when I used to listen to the radio and watch TV, the only people even considered in talking about the steroid issue in baseball are the owners and the players and whether the players will agree to the new performance enhancing drug testing methodology. Look, it's a consumer-based business. We have the ultimate power here as the baseball consumer, and it's not really even being considered.

Other fans have tried similar tactics using the Internet as a stump. But your ideas seem to be a little more subtle and a little less geared toward selling something than previous incarnations of the "fan strike" genre.

The whole way that we at fanstrike.net go about doing this is a really implementable way of cutting our expenditures as fans. If you're a true baseball fan, it's impossible to stop going and watching, but some of our suggestions and small behavioral things can make it a little bit more difficult for owners and players to earn money.

Your Web site lists a series of fan "demands," including instituting a drug testing policy with "more teeth," implementing a two-year moratorium on inducting new players into the Hall of Fame and having the commissioner mandate that the record books and the Hall of Fame specifically point out that certain home run records were broken during the Steroid Era. How did you come up with the "demands" and the fan suggestions?

I have had some of these ideas in my head for a while, and I did some informal polling of people of all ages, asking how the steroid era has affected you and how you perceive the game. Is baseball as credible to you as it was? It seems almost to a person, they don't care as much as they used to. Kids now just don't follow the game like they used to. Baseball is not being learned, the nuances of the game, as it was a while back. What compelled me to start asking the questions are seeing some of these heroes, the greatest players of my generation - Barry Bonds, Roger Clemens - implicated. Just to see it happen over the years, with it becoming almost a freak show, almost like a world's strongest man competition, made it all seem so artificially inflated. I'm a huge baseball fan, and it just doesn't seem real to me anymore.

Do you consider yourself an activist? Or is this effort out of character?

I am an activist. I've done other Web sites with the Democratic party, but this is ... I guess it's political by nature, but I don't want it to be a Republican thing or a Democratic thing. It's more of we, as baseball fans, together against the people that produce the product.

Among your suggestions are for fans to eat a big meal before going to games in order to cut down on concession-stand purchases and to buy products from the competitors of companies that advertise with the clubs. How effective do you believe these steps really can be?

As far as the suggestions - and everything here is a suggestion; it can be followed to the letter or it can be even more stringent, depending on the person - I wanted to make it as organic as possible. I didn't want to say, 'Stay away from all games.' We just hope to convince people to modify slightly their behavior, which really won't take away from your enjoyment of the game but could be effective. We aim for as good as we can get, not perfection.

You set yourself a pretty daunting task here, trying to mobilize a group of people who, by their very definition, interact with this sport in a passive way. Can it really work?

People do care. I don't know if they care enough to do anything, but I hope over the next three or four weeks the word will get out and people will have a reaction.

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