Final thoughts on Mitchell Report
Posted: Saturday, December 15, 2007 9:53 PM
Some final observations on the Mitchell Report, which you may have heard or read about in the past couple of days.
Former Sen. George Mitchell, the author, says that naming names was the right thing to do. I’m not totally in agreement with that statement. It has nothing to do with the amount of evidence he has, but with how he came by the names. The essentially fell into his lap by happenstance – a clubhouse guy from the Mets who should have gotten better tips from the players and Roger Clemens’ personal trainer, who has legal problems of his own. Those two supplier sources go along with a couple of federal investigations and corroborating witnesses.
The evidence was sufficient for Mitchell to feel he was justified in naming names. He’s a former federal prosecutor, so don’t let Clemens’ attorney bamboozle by saying Mitchell has no proof. He may not have a photograph of Clemens with needle in buttocks, but he has plenty of circumstantial proof; people have been convicted in court on less evidence than Mitchell provided, and anything to the contrary from Clemens’ or anyone else’s attorney is a smoke screen.
The problem I have is that a lot of users got off without mention because Mitchell wasn’t lucky enough to stumble onto their suppliers. And I just think it’s unfair to name some users and not all of them. There are a lot of superstars sitting at home with big smirks on their faces because they think they got away with it.
Where is Mark McGwire’s name? If Mitchell couldn’t nail him, how many others are out there who cheated and get to appear as if they didn’t? Any time you publish a list of some 80 names, it’s going to appear as if it’s a reasonably complete one. This one isn’t.
I’ll repeat that the entire report was $40 million poorly spent. I’ve said this from the beginning. From Day One, Selig should have stood up and said, “We’ve made some horrible mistakes, and they started with my office. I ignored published speculation and clear signs that baseball had a steroids problem for more than a decade before I took action only when flogged to it by Congress. The union is also to blame for refusing to help rid the game of this scourge. But we’ve got a testing program in place now, and we’re going to get these drugs out of the game.”
The NFL didn’t even give that much of a speech when it started testing in the 1980s. It just announced the program and moved ahead with it, figuring the fans didn’t really need to know the names of everyone who was doing drugs.
What baseball did was give people reasons to turn their backs on the game. The report picks at scabs, opens old wounds, and serves no purpose. Most of the cheating documented occurred before the game had either outlawed performance-enhancing drugs or tested for them. How can you criticize people for doing things you never told them not to do?
Also, there is no treatment of amphetamines. They’re just as illegal as steroids and they were far more prevalent in the game going back 50 or 60 years. The biggest names in the game gobbled them down like M&Ms. Why is one performance-enhancer picked out of the entire pharmacopeia for special treatment? Why not tell us about them all?
Donald Fehr also has to learn how to take responsibility. As the head of the union, his job is to protect the folks who pay his princely salary. But he can’t stand before the world and say the players have nothing to apologize for. They have a lot to apologize for, including blocking Selig’s limp efforts to get a testing program in place.
Finally, despite all the sturm und drang, the report isn’t going to hurt the game as long as the testing gets more rigorous an determined. Fans can believe that they’re seeing a straight product, or at least they can suspend their disbelief. They are voting with their wallets. The report is great fodder for columnists and analysts, but the game will continue to thrive.
