The Mitchell Report

The Report to the Commissioner of Baseball of an Independent Investigation into the Illegal Use of Steroids and Other Performance Enhancing Substances by Players in Major League Baseball came out today in a blaze of ... um ... glory shortly after 2pm EST. It named 85 current and former major league players that either used or helped obtain performance enhancing substances as far back as the 1990s.

It's 409 pages long, if you care to read it. I do, but I haven't read the entire thing yet. I might need some amphetamines to get through it. All I've done so far is to search out the names of players and teams I was curious about. Otherwise, I've heard Bud Selig's news conference and I was unimpressed. Bud used to own the Milwaukee Brewers and now he is the commissioner of the league.

Picture this. You have a professional sports league with a commissioner who is a former owner of one of the teams. Do you think he would always act in the best interests of the game or do you think he would be interested in helping his (former) fellow owners make as much money as possible? Remember when Dick Cheney was chosen as Bush's running mate and we figured there would be impropriety because he was CEO of Halliburton and owned a ton of stock? He claimed that, since he sold his stock that his influence-peddling days were over and he was going to act in the country's best interests as Vice President of the United States. How did that work out for us? The Selig thing is just like that.

Bud held a press conference today after Senator George Mitchell presented the report and said that he would take care of the present and future, and was satisfied that the report took care of the past. That's like, if you robbed a liquor store in 2005 and nobody found out about it until the police looked at some incriminating evidence and decided to let you go because they'll be watching you from now on. The 79 athletes named in the report apparently have nothing to fear from the fish commissioner, since he doesn't want to hurt the owners by taking away some of their best players and ... oh, I don't know ... maybe sending them to trial and possibly to prison.

As you know, players make millions of dollars, so they're not treated like us. Part of the reason they use drugs is because they make millions of dollars and stand to make millions more for every extra year they can squeeze out of their bodies. Major League baseball turned its back on something it knew about because there was money to be made. Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa helped save baseball's popularity with their drug-enhanced home run race in 1998. Anybody with eyes in their head and pictures of young and slim McGwire and Sosa figured it out, but the TV revenue flowed in like water, so it continued.

The team trainers knew, the team owners knew, the front offices knew, the sportswriters knew and worst of all the commissioner's office knew. None of them did anything to try to stop it until Barry Bonds' head became so huge and his numbers likewise that it finally started to blow up in their faces. Formerly average players were having 50 home run seasons and even the most ignorant fans wondered what in Hell was going on.

Pitchers were throwing 100mph and breaking down faster than when pitchers threw twice as many innings. If you were surprised to see Roger Clemens' name among the violators, you really weren't paying attention.

When there are millions of dollars at stake, people (not just athletes) will do things that they wouldn't normally do in order for the money to keep coming in. They're called performance enhancing drugs for a reason. If they didn't help, they'd be called something else. We're supposed to be trying to keep our kids from using them, but they're being used in high school and college now because they enhance ones performance. The better they perform, the greater the chances are that they will sign a lucrative professional contract. When one player uses them, as Sosa and McGwire did, it encourages others (like Bonds) to use them so that they can keep up. The drugs create a bigger chasm between the great players and the scrubs, so the scrubs start using them because there are plenty of lousy players in the minor leagues who would love to play in Philadelphia or Houston, so the lousy major leaguers use the drugs so that they can keep their jobs. It really isn't all that complicated.

So what happens now? Nothing. Players have turned from steroids to Human Growth Hormones because there is no reliable urine test for HGH and baseball can't prove that players are using it unless they are stupid enough to write checks and talk to their teammates. Today, we found out that 85 of them are that stupid. The smart ones didn't get caught.

There likely will be no retroactive punishment, no records will be expunged and since many of the players are retired, they will return to their giant tract homes and reflect back on the days when they could hit a ball further than anyone or throw faster than anyone. They'll remember how the fans cheered and how it seemed like they were kids again, playing a game for more money than they ever knew existed. They may have thought, at the time, that what they were doing was "cheating", or they may have thought they were merely surviving in a sport where competition is fierce and fame is fleeting.

After all, they just gave the people what they wanted.