Much Ado About Nothing.

I'll admit it: I was excited to see the list of players that would appear in George Mitchell's report to Bud Selig today. When I found out that my classes were cancelled tonight on account of the snow storm, the first thing I thought was how now I would take my time and sift through the information that was brought to light by the senator (a Bowdoin graduate by the way.). I wasn't sure why I was so excited. I didn't expect anything significant to come out of the report, and I certainly didn't anticipate any major changes to help pull baseball out from underneath the dark cloud that hangs over it. These feelings of anticipation weren't the ones that I usually feel when I'm waiting to hear about sports news. It felt more like I was waiting for a commercial break to end so that I could see what would happen when Jerry Springer revealed the paternity test results to a bunch of people that live in the same motor park.




I can remember having discussions with people when Senator Mitchell was first asked to carry out this investigation. I thought it was a bad idea. There are questions about the steroid era that are never going to be definitively answered. That's baseball's problem. They had been turning a blind eye to this problem since the last major labor dispute in an effort to attract fans who said that they would never watch the sport again. Anybody who says that they didn't think Mark McGwire and Barry Bonds were taking performance-enhancing substances during their record-setting home run seasons either hasn't been a baseball fan for very long or simply allowed themselves to get swept up in the pageantry and excitement of what was happening. In fact, if Barry Bonds had never made his assault on Hank Aaron's sacred home run record, we still might be ignoring this issue today. But, he did and we're not. I believed when George Mitchell began his investigation, as I do now, that baseball needs to focus its attention on preventing these problems in the future. They have done a good job with this. But, congressional hearings? A senators investigation? This produces nothing but more speculation. It is irresponsible. George Mitchell can't produce positive tests from thest players. There was no testing policy. Most people aren't going to talk with him, so he's only going to be dealing with a small sample of people. Most of these people we know nothing about. We have no idea what they stand to gain or what kind of past they have. I knew this going in, and yet I was still excited today.

I was excited until I actually read about the report. I didn't read the actual report, because it is 400 pages long. If you want to read the opinion of someone who read it, you'll have to consult an article by somebody who gets paid to write about sports. But, I have read the news about the report and the circumstances that led to players being named in the report. Still, my view has not changed. This was a waste of time. There are all kinds of accusations made against current and retired players. But, there is nothing useful here. First of all, Mitchell's information comes from a very small sample of people within the sport. So, it's not like we have the definitive, comprehensive list of all players who took steroids. Instead, we have a few names (judging by what retired players have said, a very small number) of players who have been said to take these drugs. And, what exactly are we supposed to do with this information? Are we really supposed to keep Roger Clemens out of the hall of fame because one trainer claims to have injected him with steroids? Is that really enough proof to totally ruin this man's legacy. We have no idea about whether or not this guy is telling the truth. And, just to point this out again, we have NO POSITIVE TESTS. Look, Roger may have taken steroids. I wouldn't be surprised. Unfortunately, we'll never know for sure. But, again, this is baseball's problem. They didn't have the proper safeguards in place. Now, they're just trying to put out fires.

The one thing that I do agree with from the report is that the burden in this case falls on the shoulders of the people at the top of Major League Baseball and the Players Union. There are a lot of names on Mitchell's list. It can be assumed that there were a lot more then 86 guys using sterroids over the past15 years. But, if baseball had done its job and had a testing and suspension policy in place, that number would have been much lower. If baseball had done its job, we would know for sure who was taking these drugs and who wasn't, because we would have tests. If baseball had done its job, we would have real proof in this report, and this whole saga would feel much less like a witch hunt. There is no easy fix here. If baseball really wants to make this right, they need to turn their attention away from the past and concentrate on the future.