The Mitchell Abomination

“As a fan of both baseball and due process, let me just say that today is a sad day, a shameful day, and that what we’re about to witness is a travesty.” – Joe Sheehan, Baseball Prospectus

Other than season-ending strikes and lockouts, never before has a major American sport undertaken an affair as self-destructive as the Mitchell investigation. Flawed in concept, butchered in execution, and riddled with hypocrisy, Sen. George Mitchell’s investigation and subsequent report have set baseball public relations back to the Stone Age (1994), and to no discernible end.

Dozens of current and former baseball players, some guilty, some almost assuredly innocent, today find their reputations marred and their livelihoods endangered by circumstantial and specious evidence. Some of the worst steroid offenders are now exonerated in the court of public opinion merely on the basis of not being mentioned in a deeply defective, half-realized report. Maddeningly, this witch-hunt served no purpose other than the institution of baseball intentionally creating a storm of negative headlines for itself.

To be clear, steroids and HGH are blights on the game of baseball. Sacred records have been illegitimately smashed. In a sport so reliant on and enriched by statistics, the numbers have transmogrified to the point of being meaningless. It’s heart-breaking that Barry Bonds passed Babe Ruth and Hank Aaron, and likely fraudulent that Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa passed Roger Maris. But the problem is systemic, and no one can be absolved by releasing a list of a group of players who were unlucky enough to have their trainers or dealers snitch.

The release of the Mitchell Report has placed the focus of this epidemic squarely on the individual players named therein. But Major League Baseball had no significant steroid testing policy in place. Reporters looked the other way as backne-covered man-beasts walked shirtless around locker rooms. Idiot fans basked in the McGwire/Sosa spectacle. Bud Selig and his compadres sat on piles of money like so many Scrooge McDucks. Everyone involved with baseball was complicit with allowing this to happen. It was like “The Wire,” — every institution within and related to the game was interconnected, and the faults of each validated the faults of the others.

The Mitchell investigation was destined to fail from the day of its conception. Bud Selig, panicked at the threat of Congressional intervention (and Congress has nothing to be proud of here, either), foolishly put together an “independent” investigation into steroid use without thinking through the consequences. In a stunning example of cronyism at its finest, Selig selected pal George Mitchell to head the inquisition.

Mitchell, a member of the Democratic leadership in the Senate that allowed Ronald Reagan to run roughshod over the Constitution, later joined the boards of directors of the two most evil corporations in the United States: Disney and the Boston Red Sox.

So began an ineffectual, non-comprehensive twenty-month study into, apparently, which players used steroids and nothing more. Mitchell and his goons, enabled by the commissioner, coerced players to rat each out, promoted hearsay and kept the black cloud of steroids in the headlines continually for two full baseball seasons.

What could Selig possible have hoped to gain, other than making himself appear less culpable? What purpose could Mitchell serve by digging up rumors and dirt from the era before baseball began its new drug-testing policy? Perhaps Selig was looking for a scapegoat; perhaps he thought the problem would be less severe in the end that the Cansecos and Caminitis of the world claimed. Perhaps he thought the report would be the silver bullet he needed to bring down Bonds, the great white whale of his tenure as commissioner.

Yet no matter how imprudent the Mitchell investigation’s design may have been, the results are amazingly even worse.

After 20 months of non-stop investigative work, Mitchell’s results were predicated almost entirely on the testimony of two former clubhouse types with incentives to both cooperate and lie. Beyond the names supplied by Kirk Radomski and Brian McNamee, the report merely regurgitates findings from other newspaper and police investigations.

No wonder Mitchell couldn’t push the Clintons’ health-care initiative through Congress.

So two trainer-types flipped, and the players they were so associated with have the misfortune of being fingered, while countless other drug suppliers didn’t cooperate or weren’t found, and the players who bought drugs from them get off scot-free.

It’s been widely mentioned, but it can’t be ignored that Mitchell’s ties to the Red Sox don’t reflect well either on the high number of Yankees mentioned in the report, or the total lack of current Red Sox players present. Perhaps Mitchell is an above-board, stand-up guy who would never even think to let a conflict of interests like that affect his integrity. But perhaps not. And Bud Selig was insane not to think that conflict might become an issue when selecting the person to run his investigation.

The media has had its panties in a bunch about steroids for several years now, but the public remains largely indifferent. At the least, fans don’t seem to be boycotting the game or spending less money on consuming it because of their opinions about drugs. There certainly hasn’t been any kind of outcry to expose which players injected what when. So Bud Selig has allowed, even endorsed, a saga that sullied the game’s reputation all to examine water under the bridge.

So it’s alleged that Player X took HGH in 2002. So the fuck what? That accusation accomplishes what, exactly, other than making the commissioner look bad for not having a solid policy in place before he did?

Baseball needs to attempt to clean up the game moving forward. Retroactively humiliating a small subset of possible steroids users only makes everyone involved with baseball look bad, for a longer period of time than necessary.

Bud Selig should be ashamed by this self-defeating sham, this mockery of justice. Nothing good has come from the Mitchell Report, and nothing good will come. Baseball shot itself in the knee for no discernible reason.

Bud Selig Sticks His Lovely Nose Where It Doesn't Belong

Sorry to turn your stomachs so close to a holiday weekend.

But...Bud Selig has decided it's his job to make recommendations (via Buster Olney) for who the Houston Astros hire as their manager.

Fuck the heck are you doing, Budsie? The commissioner is supposed to be an impartial authority, not some whiny douchebag urging his crony, Drayton McLane, to help fill the minority quota. And for Selig to say that Cecil Cooper has somehow earned the right to be retained as manager? How exactly, has he done that in his week on the job? Nothing against Cooper, maybe he does deserve the job. But Selig needs to mind his own muthafuckin' beeswax.

First, the inane draft slots, in which teams are "encouraged" to only spend so much money on any given draft pick (I'm pretty sure Brian Cashman and Dave Dombrowski have woken up with horse's heads in their bed recently), and now this. Maybe Bud Selig should focus on his actual job, and not try to run every team in baseball. Maybe then, baseball wouldn't be embroiled in a neverending farce of a steroids scandal, and some teams wouldn't be extorting taxpayers for millions of dollars to build new stadiums while other teams draw 15,000 per night. And maybe, for once, I could watch a game on Saturday afternoon that doesn't involve the fucking Cubs while I'm paying $170 for the fucking Extra Innings package.

USA Today is on a Roll

In light of their recent published drivel about the Red Sox marrying the Statue of Liberty and raising little patriots together, you might think the multi-colored lady that is USA Today would take a few days off from printing sheer idiocy about the sport of baseball. You might be wrong.

With no trace of irony or dissent, today's bright red sports section features an article about the excitement of the current Wild Card races, and, for good measure, adds a sidebar about how proud Bud Selig is of the Wild Card:

"Well, I'm very proud with what's going on now. Here we are, down to the last five weeks of the season, and we're going to have wild-card races that are legendary."

Yes, Bud, there's so much of which to be proud. The six divisions and Wild Card races are going swimmingly. Nothing to see here. Move along. In related news, the U.S. occupation of Iraq is problem-free and we have been widely accepted as liberators.

The only thing legendary about the pennant races this year is the sheer number of dreadful teams in contention. Teams that have no business anywhere within sniffing distance of the post-season.

To wit: The San Diego Padres lead the N.L. Wild Card chase by three games, despite not having one great (or even very good) hitter in their lineup. The Cincinnati Reds, at 60-70, are only 6.5 games out of first place. Last year's disgrace of a World Series champion, the St. Louis Cardinals, are again locked in a tight race despite being on pace for even less than the 83 wins they managed a season ago.

And those legendary Wild Card races Selig is getting so erect for (sorry for the mental image)? An overachieving Seattle team and a flawed Yankees squad fighting it out down the stretch doesn't really seem the stuff of legends. Neither does the Padres and Phillies trying to figure out who sucks less.

The Wild Card definitely has its advantages, one of which is that a lot more fans have a lot more hope later in the season. But for Selig to pretend that it's flawless is silly, self-serving hype. The new playoff system, combined with the commissioner's push for parity, has resulted in one entire league not having a great team for the last five years. The National League is so bad right now that it's an embarrassment to baseball. Who cares if crappy teams are in contention for the playoffs? Who wants to see a Reds-Dodgers best-of-five anyway?

If the old divisional system were still in place, the Red Sox would still be running away with the A.L. East, but the Angels and Mariners would be locked in a tight race for the West, with something actually at stake because the loser would go home.

Every word out of Bud Selig's mouth is intended to make us think he's done a great job. He hasn't.

Bud Selig Should Just Throw Up His Hands in an Effeminate Display of Self-Doubt Again

Dear Buster Olney:

I do not care whether Bud Selig attends the game in which Barry Bonds breaks Hank Aaron's record. I do not care whether sportswriters think Bud Selig should or should not attend the game in which Barry Bonds breaks Hank Aaron's record. Kindly stop wasting space in your blog, which I rely on for out-of-town news and occasionally some decent analysis, linking to the opinions of these morons.

Apparently, every sports columnist in America received a memo before the season stating that they're contractually required to weigh in on this riveting national debate. They should have all gotten together in March and teamed up to write two columns: one pro-attendance, and one anti-attendance. Instead, they wrote hundreds of articles individually based on the same two theses.

Bud Selig should watch 756 in person because as commissioner, he has a responsibility to the game, and he can't cherry-pick which aspects of the sport he associates with. And Barry Bonds never even failed a drug test! If Selig rode the McGwire/Sosa season to respectability, he would be a hypocrite to ignore Bonds now.

OR

How dare Bud Selig even consider attending the record-breaking game? Barry Bonds is a disgrace to this wonderful pastime of ours, and Selig's presence is a silent approval of the legions of players who broke the rules (AND THE LAW) for their own financial gain.

There. I just wrote both columns. That's all that needs to be said. The next writer that Buster Olney links to who feels the need to chime in with his own derivative opinion on this topic will be an official enemy of thepsychofan.blogspot.com. That's my promise.

The Giambi and Selig Tango

The inquisition of Jason Giambi is quickly becoming a litmus test for where people stand on the steroid issue, and who they most blame. A cadre of sportswriters have used Bud Selig's threat of suspension unless Giambi cooperates with the Mitchell investigation as an excuse to rock the pulpit hard.

The Jon Heymans of the world argue that Giambi has some sort of responsibility to cooperate with the investigation, for the good of the game, and perhaps as some sort of self-flagellating cleansing ritual. They couldn't be more wrong.

Giambi is no saint, and his body is likely paying the price now for his past (or current) sins, but his semi-apologies are considerably further than any other current player has gone in accepting responsibility for the steroid era. And he has absolutely no obligation, legal, moral or otherwise, to help out Bud Selig's gang of torch-bearing yokels.

The Mitchell investigation is about one thing and one thing only: Bud Selig attempting to cover his ass with the fans and the media. It's a naked public relations gambit with no real power, and no interest in finding the truth. George Mitchell is the head of a Selig-empowered lynch mob looking for a few scapegoats...three or four current or former players that can bear the brunt of the blame, allowing Selig to come out clean and put the issue to bed once and for all.

The commissioner pretends that the investigation is some multi-tentacled, all-encompassing beast endeavoring to explore every nook and cranny of a vast steroid conspiracy perpetrated on his beloved game by the evil players and their back-alley doctors. In reality, the truth is utterly inconsequential. Pinning Barry Bonds and a few others to the wall will suffice.

Much has been written about who's to blame for the rampant steroid and HGH use in baseball, and there's much culpability to spread around: players, managers, owners, writers and fans all looked the other way happily while Barry Bonds, Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa walked around looking like G.I. Joe figures and destroyed the record books. But the person most to blame is the one who held the most power at the time - Bud Selig. Recently, Selig has been caught in lies about how much he knew about steroids and when, and we can only hope that a Woodward and Bernstein are somewhere out there looking for their Watergate.

Selig rode the tide of public opinion in the late '90s, happily benefiting from the effects of the pills, powders and needles. Then, when the fans turned, mainly because of Bonds, and Congress grumbled, the commissioner put on a show of acting like an angry, shocked, betrayed parent. "I can't believe you kids were taking drugs this whole time! And after all these talks we had! How could you do this to me?"

Anybody with a conscience or sense of propriety will refuse to cooperate with the Mitchell investigation. Bud Selig deserves to deal with the problem he helped foster by looking the other way for far too long. Moreover, the investigation is primarily dealing with events from three, five and ten years ago. It's too late to ban certain players from the record books, and baseball has too little power to suspend players retroactively, especially considering that a steroid policy wasn't even in place at the time.

Jason Giambi is no hero. I don't even really like the guy. But if he stays on his present course and shuns the investigators, he will have done the right thing. Caving in to Selig's bullying (but impotent) strong-arm tactics will send the wrong kind of message to other players. The only correct way for the Mitchell investigation to end is with the inquisitors throwing their hands in the air and giving up.