After the commissioner's office received access to the report, word leaked out that the Mitchell report was tough on Major League Baseball; the advance notice was that individuals within the MLB offices were upset, angry. Which is, of course, what Major League Baseball needs everybody to believe: that it really got thumped.
Then
George Mitchell stood in front of a microphone and said out loud, "Everybody involved in baseball -- commissioners, club officials, the players association and the players -- shares responsibility to some extent for the steroids era. There was a collective failure to recognize the problem and deal with it early on." Baseball had a drug culture, Mitchell said, a nice general thesis that was fresh when it was first reported years ago by the San Francisco Chronicle, ESPN, the New York Daily News, Sports Illustrated and just about every other major news outlet.
But if you expected any critical insight from the report into how that culture developed, well, forget it. Baseball's leaders should send a Christmas basket to Mitchell for the way he glossed over the decisions -- their decisions -- that created the vacuum in which hundreds or even thousands of players, in the majors and minors, felt free, or felt the need, to take drugs.
To continue reading this article you must be an Insider
Buster Olney
