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Mitchell Report has plenty to blame for steroids

Johnette Howard

December 14, 2007

With every turn of the page in the Mitchell Report on performance-enhancing drug use that was released yesterday, what had been seen as a baseball-wide scandal at the start of the day narrowed swiftly and sharply, at least for New Yorkers. It became a Yankees and Mets story that will cast aspersions on everything from the Yankees' title runs of the 1990s to the damaged Hall of Fame candidacy of Roger Clemens. A few minutes after 2 p.m, Clemens officially became the white Barry Bonds.

But if you're more interested in the "how" - as in, how the biggest sports fraud ever perpetrated on the American public could've happened - baseball trotted out its own Exhibit A, commissioner Bud Selig, 2 1/2 hours after Mitchell's long-awaited report was released at a separate news conference yesterday.

Selig, spouting all his usual pieties about being the guardian of the game, made an astonishing admission. Despite receiving an advance look at Mitchell's findings two days earlier, despite bearing the responsibility of speaking for all of baseball's owners on one of the darkest days in the sport's history, Selig volunteered "in the name of candor" that "I have yet to read the entire report."

He added, "But from what I've been briefed" - briefed? - "I think he's given a very, very thorough report."

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Selig looked foolish and uncontrite. It was hard to take any of the bromides or self-serving statements he said before or afterward seriously.

George Mitchell, the former Senate majority leader whom Selig commissioned 21 months ago, had just publicly released a damaging 400-plus-page finding that named 83 players, said all 30 baseball teams had players who cheated, and included detailed narratives of how deep the drug culture ran. The most explosive example showed how a former Yankees trainer, Brian McNamee, told federal investigators that he personally injected Clemens and Yankees teammate Andy Pettitte with performance-enhancing drugs, a charge Clemens hotly denied by early evening.

But the report is persuasive, even to a skeptical eye. It includes Xeroxes of canceled checks from players to former Mets clubhouse go-fer Kirk Radomski of Long Island, who set up a drug pipeline that serviced many of the 21 former and current Yankees and 13 former or current Mets whom Mitchell named, along with scads of other players. Without Radomski, Mitchell would've had next to nothing new.

The report includes accounts of major-league front office personnel openly discussing steroid use during trade talks or roster evaluations, players shooting up together and club employees failing to report incidents of use.

Yet there stood Selig yesterday, demurring when asked if he accepts the share of the blame that Mitchell laid at his feet, along with everyone else's.

"Hindsight is wonderful," Selig said, "and I can understand how he [Mitchell] feels that way. There are people in baseball who feel differently."

Wrong answer again.

Baseball was wise to finally do this sort of rigorous self-examination of its $6-billion industry. But the sport deserves scant praise. Selig's timing was indefensibly late. This sort of inquiry was forced on baseball by congressional pressure, some law enforcement investigations and a couple of tell-all books.

The predictable braying later in the day from Don Fehr and the Players Association was ill-advised, too. The union has plenty of very legitimate arguments to make about incursions on players' rights, lack of due process and so on. But there was time to lay out those complaints long and loudly before yesterday. Yesterday's talking points should've been about conceding problems. Because the jig is up.

Whatever the specifics, whether or not you accept Mitchell's report wholesale, the big picture does not change.

The Steroid Era was populated by frauds.

It was presided over by a power structure that knew it was happening, and the lowest equipment man to executives in the highest corridors of power all conspired to hide it.

The public was systematically deceived.

The record book and rosters are polluted with cheats.

This sport is filthy. And there remain plenty of signs not everyone's conscience is paining them. Teams have continued in the last few weeks and days to trade or sign players caught using drugs.

During the walk from one news conference to the other yesterday, some snapshot moments that stick in the craw came reeling back to mind: All these years of hearing Clemens credit hard work for his seven Cy Youngs or being a power pitcher long past 40 . . . The sight of another phony, Mark McGwire, hugging Roger Maris' sons the night he took their father's single-season home run record ... Rafael Palmeiro shaking a finger at Congress and declaring he never used steroids . . . Bonds daring the Feds to come and get him and, later, Bonds staring defiantly at a questioner who - on the night he passed Babe Ruth's record of 714 home runs - wanted to know if everything he'd gone through to that point was worth it.

"Oh, yeah," Bonds nodded, "it was worth it."

Depends on your point of view. The Mitchell Report's greatest value is that baseball can't say it didn't happen anymore. They knew. They all knew.