Mitchell Report was a good start
The greatest hitter of our time and the greatest pitcher of our time both used steroids.
As anticlimactic, unsatisfying and irresponsible as the Mitchell Report turned out to be, the fact that Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens clearly cheated puts an exclamation point on the Asterisk Era.
Baseball numbers are considered sacred by so many people because generations of us grew up with the game. It linked us to our fathers, who were linked to their fathers, who were linked to our great grandfathers. Although other sports have rivaled or even surpassed modern baseball in popularity, baseball — more than any other sport — not only was a seminal component of America’s culture and growth in the 20th century and further back, it was uniquely intertwined with American boyhood.
Imagine if, when you were a kid, you looked back through the numbers and lure of baseball history — as so many of us loved to do — and you saw that Babe Ruth and Walter Johnson had used illegal drugs to make themselves better players. And imagine if speculation, but not hard proof, existed about numerous other players from that general time. Even a child, given the fact that premier players such as Ruth and Johnson cheated, would know such an era had no integrity.
Like our current era.
The Mitchell Report, which was supposed to be definitive and provide a sense of closure to the steroid speculation of the last several years, barely scratched the surface. Commissioner Bud Selig may have had the best of intentions when he requested the investigation, but like so many other events under this commissioner, the Mitchell Report was a bungling failure.
At least it gave us Clemens.
Former senator George Mitchell had no subpoena power, so instead he used very limited sources (which happened to give his report a New York imbalance), hearsay and uncorroborated anecdotes as evidence. All the speculation, accusations and claims most of us already knew about, and which most journalists would never publish unless they wanted to get sued, Mitchell shed no new light on but simply threw into his report. The Clemens evidence was some of the only evidence with teeth.
The very fact a report on performance-enhancing drugs was commissioned by Major League Baseball and was delivered is significant. The fact that Mitchell skewered Selig and team owners as accomplices to steroids in baseball is significant. The mere fact this report exists — despite its vast shortcomings, which left plenty of guilty players breathing a sigh of relief after not being named — puts an official stamp on the Steroid Era.
Now, it is time for the United States government to step in.
The good that came out of the Mitchell Report was not good enough.
The Mitchell investigation was sanctioned, in part, to keep Congress off of baseball’s back. But what the report revealed (a steroid user at the top of the sport and implications of rampant use throughout the sport) and what the report did not reveal (anything close to a complete picture of who, what, when, where and how) demands the subpoena power of govermnent intervention.
I want names. I want details. I want Bud Selig burned at the stake or I want him to resign.
I want to know what happened, as best we possibly can. I want accountability.
Selig, in the report he ordered, finally has been exposed as the disgrace he is. I don’t care about his achievements (expanded playoffs, record revenues, etc.). Many of Selig’s so-called accomplishments, specifically baseball’s resurgence at the gate, were based on steroids and Selig’s blind eye to steroids. This commissioner failed to do his number one job: preserve the integrity of the game.
I feel sad today. My childhood sport — the childhood sport for many of us, spanning generations — has been irreparably damaged. Baseball, as it always does, will go on. But steroids have created an historic disconnect unlike any the sport has ever seen, and the problem remains inadequately addressed.
In a strange sense, current fans of baseball are left with a sullied feeling for being linked to this era. All of us, who saw records shattered and then shattered again over the last decade, in some form have witnessed the death of baseball as we’ve known it since the days of our great grandfathers.
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