Not Much to See Here

Mitchell Report Count me as underwhelmed by the Mitchell Report on steroid use in baseball. I’ve read part of it and as I suspected there isn’t really much “there” there. Yes, the list named Roger Clemens and Andy Pettitte but beyond them and a few others this dreaded “list” has a bunch of has-been or journeyman players on it. I expected as much. You have to figure the big stars that could have been on this list switched over from steroids to HGH (human growth hormone, for which baseball does not test) when baseball began testing for performance enhancing substances in 2003. Some of the players are clean but it’s important to remember that just because a player does not appear on the list it doesn’t necessarily mean he is not using banned substances. In some cases he probably just hasn’t been caught. The fact of the matter is that Mitchell did a thorough job with his investigation but in the end this is really just a ho-hum affair. He had no subpoena power in conducting the investigation so what he was able to find out was limited. Add to that the fact that the baseball players association gave him zero cooperation and this report is about the best you can expect. Considering what was available to Mitchell he did OK. In fact, the strongest part of the report is the recommendations Mitchell makes to clean up the sport. They really make a lot of sense. But OK is not what baseball envisioned when they asked him to delve into this issue. It all goes back to one thing for me when discussing performance enhancers in baseball- without the ability to administer blood tests, which test HGH levels, the major league drug program has little credibility. Like Mitchell’s report, the testing program isn’t all it could be. As I’ve said time and again, until baseball brokers a deal with this god-forsaken players union to allow blood tests, don’t expect me or thousands of others fans to lose sleep over whether baseball is legit or not. I just don’t care because the players union, and to some degree, the owners don’t care. Let me just watch the game. As far as I’m concerned everyone in baseball is still under suspicion because of the spector of HGH but I just don’t care. It’s not going to make me stop watching a sport that I love. If these players want to jeopardize their future health in order to cash in on their career earning power, go right ahead. Just don’t expect me to care. If the union allowed their players to be blood tested it would show they care about their members and the sport. Short of that I’m not interested in hearing the rhetoric that comes out of the mouths of Don Fehr and Gene Orza. Baseball should be no different than any other business- if you want to work there you should be subject to full drug testing just like many of us in the workforce. All we hear from guys like Fehr and Orza all day long is how baseball is a business. Well, if it is, its employees should be subject to drug testing if they want to work there, like many of us in the “business” world. If not, don’t play. The union wants a double standard only when it is convenient for them and drug testing certainly fits their bill. In that case, baseball is a sport, not a business. You can’t have it both ways. The whole thing is just a big dog and pony show and never was that more clearly proven than by the release of this much-anticipated report which turned out to tell us little more than we already knew.