Mitchell Report Fails To Reveal "New" Information

All 409 pages of the Mitchell Report are available to be viewed, and you need to skim through all of them to find the names we were all clamoring to see. There is no "list", as many hoped, but paragraphs dedicated to each player accused of wrongdoing. Among the major offenders, all the BALCO characters (Bonds, Sheffield, Giambi) appear, as well as Roger Clemens and Andy Pettitte. The report failed to include juicy names floating around this morning such as Albert Pujols and Ivan "Pudge" Rodriguez. Aside from Manny Alexander and Brendan Donnelly, there is a startling lack of Red Sox. I'm intrigued to hear Senator Mitchell's reponse to the numerous questions directed at him for such omissions. There are several things to take in to account while reviewing the document, if you have the time. First and foremost, the findings are predicated largely on the testimony of former trainers who supplied the drugs to the athletes. Several of the players have paper trails, including checks to said trainers for large sums of money to purchase performance enhancing drugs, that pretty much seals their fate. However, there is a lack of support for several players included.

One player that I quickly followed up on was Yankees pitcher Andy Pettitte. I'll be forthright in saying that my biases are difficult to hide concerning Pettitte, but take in to account the following. The alleged injections of human growth hormone administered by his personal trainer Brian McNamee occurred during the summer of 2002. MLB did not ban this substance until 2003. Therefore, he did nothing against the rules. Which brings us to the underlying issue in this "retroactive policing"; if there were no rules prohibiting the use of certain substances at the time, how can we punish players now for taking them? There's reason to believe that the drugs positively affected their performance and may leave some of their accomplishments tainted, but do we even know that for sure? It's an ethical dilemma that anyone can relate to. If there was a way for you to advance in your job that was morally questionable, yet technically by the books, would you do it? Almost everyone would say yes. Doesn't that make critics more than a little bit hypocritical?

Finally, now the question becomes, who to blame? Some will blame the players, some will blame the trainers, some will blame the coaches and executives. The report finds that everyone's to blame; one point I whole-heartedly agree on. However, I place most of the blame with greedy MLB executives. We've all KNOWN this is going on for years. The sport nearly died in 1994, and guess what saved it? The power surge of chemically enhanced Sammy Sosa and Mark McGwire in 1998. If not for Victor Conte and BALCO, the startling details of the operation in "The Game of Shadows", or the increasingly accurate auto-biography "Juiced" by Jose Canseco, the MLB execs across the street on Park Ave would have never addressed this issue. Their league became flushed with cash. Revenues are soaring, attendance is through the roof, and baseball is second fiddle only to the NFL. They thrived on turning a blind eye to their problems and were hoping to ride the wave for as long as possible.

With that being said, it's not fair to put all the blame on MLB. Clearly the players who not only risked their own health, but set a poor example for America's youth, should not have gone down this path. But can you really expect some of the most competitive people in the world not to look for avenues to be more successful? Instead, I find the players union as culpable as the big wigs in Manhattan. For years they met drug testing policy with such resistance that it became impossible for any decent legislation to pass. It wasn't until 2003, when it became clear the sport needed to do something to save face, that they reached an agreement on a more stringent drug testing policy. Even then, players and trainers continued to find loopholes. Many turned to hGh, a drug undetectable by the league's testing procedures.

Sadly, there's one irrefuitble truth. No matter what laws get passed, or how sports attempt to clean themselves up, there will always be a market for athletes looking to gain a competitive advantage. That's why we think of them as super heroes. It's in their DNA. It's what makes them great. But it's also what makes them human.