baseball Archive

Earlier today, former senator George Mitchell released the findings of his yearlong investigation on Major League Baseball’s problem with performance enhancing drugs. When you cut through the extensive verbiage of the report, you can essentially break it down to these components:

• a list of players with alleged evidence linking them to performance enhancing drugs prior to 2002
• the conclusion that prior to 2003, players, team executives, and MLB officials did not make a huge effort to make sure performance enhancing drugs were not used
• the conclusion that if the players union and MLB officials can agree to cooperate, they can lessen the the number of cases of performance enhancing drug use
• the recommendation that players named in the report not be punished for past actions

Obviously the most exciting aspect of the report is the list of players who have supposedly been linked to performance enhancing drugs. Unfortunately, the list is comprised of either evidence we have already heard before or hearsay. Mitchell’s report references the whole BALCO scenario from a couple years back, along with the more recent cases of players purchasing drugs via the internet. In both cases, the evidence was not considered concrete enough in order to convict players of wrongdoing. The more interesting allegations are of Roger Clemens and Andy Pettite. Former Yankees trainer, Brian McNamee admitted to injecting Clemens and Pettite with HGH and other performance enhancing drugs prior to 2001. Most of the evidence for the other named players are not more substantial than a “I heard that someone told him that he injected steroids.”

However, we have no way of knowing whether Clemens, Pettite, or any one of these players actually used performance enhancing drugs because they have never tested positive for any sort of doping. In fact, most of the drugs in question are not currently detectable by any means. The best thing we can do is finger point and say “This dude (who is probably saying what he has to in order to not go to jail) says he injected you.” In addition, the conclusions of the report, while they needed to be reiterated, were not exactly as enlightening as when the apple fell on Newton. Anyone with half a brain now can see what baseball was doing wrong in the late 20th century-early 21st century.

In other words, this whole report was a waste of time.

Read the Mitchell Report in its entirety [mlb.com]