Leadership Quote by Jim Sensenbrenner

There is a bureaucrat’s bleak elegance in Sensenbrenner’s “Sadly”: a single adverb that performs concern while quietly widening the target. The line isn’t trying to enlighten anyone about performance-enhancing drugs; it’s trying to reposition the story. Baseball was the scandal people could picture - home runs, heroes, record books - but Sensenbrenner’s intent is to yank the issue out of the dugout and into the committee room, where Congress can justify hearings, subpoenas, and televised moral theater.

The phrasing is doing two jobs at once. First, it tampers down the comforting idea that baseball is uniquely rotten, which would let everyone else off the hook. “Not isolated” is a policy-maker’s favorite kind of alarm bell: vague enough to be true, firm enough to demand action. Second, it signals a pivot from sport-as-entertainment to sport-as-governance problem. If the “problem” is everywhere, then oversight everywhere starts to sound reasonable - not just for MLB, but for football, Olympic sports, high schools, even the supplement industry and medical regulation.

The subtext is also reputational triage. By framing steroid use as a broad societal issue, he avoids the appearance of opportunism (piling onto baseball) while still riding the cultural outrage. It’s a politician’s way of converting fandom’s disappointment into legislative legitimacy: you’re not just mad; you’re right to be, and we can do something about it.