The big story in baseball today is that Texas Rangers Manager Ron Washington tested positive for cocaine last year. The bigger news, to me at least, is that the Rangers are standing by Washington and allowing him to keep his job. This is a reprehensible stance on the part of the Rangers management.
Just a few days ago an American couple who worked at the US Embassy in Mexico were brutally gunned down as they returned home from a child’s birthday party. Their own 1-year-old child, in the back seat of the car, was unhurt but there was a profoundly tragic image of a Mexican policeman holding the child as his colleagues went through the bullet riddled SUV. The violent mexican drug wars that the media have been reporting recently are the direct result of an insatiable US demand for Cocaine among other drugs. This is acknowledged by both the US and Mexican governments. In a sense then it is recreational Cocaine users like Ron Washington who are indirectly responsible for the murder of the US diplomat and her husband. For they are the ones creating the demand. Not only is it absurd to allow Washington to keep his job after he tested positive for Cocaine ( he is after all a manager and managers are not supposed to fail drug tests), but given the fact that the spate in drug related violence is happening on the Texas-Mexico border one would expect the Rangers management would have terminated Washington’s contract immediately, if for no other reason than to send a message to their own community that they do not condone any activity that has led, even indirectly, to the deaths of thousands of innocent Mexican and American citizens since the drug wars began in 2006.
A final thought on this post: I wonder what the Rangers’s first ever manager would say about all this were he still alive. That would be Ted Williams of course.
The Sports Purist 
OK, wait a minute. First of all, businesses of all sorts have a policy of attempting to rehabilitate employees who have problems with alcohol and drugs. Why should the Texas Rangers be any different? Alcoholism and drug abuse are not a moral issues, but health issues. And besides, it would have been totally hypocritical to fire Washington after standing by Josh Hamilton, whose struggles with alcohol and drugs are well known, when Hamilton relapsed last year. Would you have simply cut Hamilton, too? You are way off base.
Well, Government is a business too, the business of running a city or a country. If an elected public official is caught using cocaine they are forced to resign immediately and very likely their public career is over. ( unless,sadly, you are the mayor of Washington DC or Detroit ).
Managers should be held to these same lofty moral standards, all the more so nowadays when drug use is a scourge in sports at all levels. The Rangers should have relieved Washington from his responsibilities but allowed him to stay in the organization while he was seeking treatment ( I say this even though I was a Ron Washington fan when he coached for the A’s). Ditto for Hamilton. His behavior in that bar last year, when he was gropiing women and asking for Coke ( not the beverage) did not merit the Rangers or the public’s support. It was disgusting. The Rangers have stood behind him for one reason: $