December 13, 2007

Mitchell Report Response

It's 2:40 p.m., forty minutes after the Mitchell Report was released.

I'm already over it. Almost all of the revelations in the report come from either collected news reports or the leads provided by Radomski and McNamee. David Segui, for example, appears to have introduced steroids everywhere he went. To me, that means these names are just the tip of the iceberg, and just the people who bought through the revealed channels.

So what have we learned? Pretty much nothing. Crappy players juiced. Good players juiced. That indicates to me that a fairly large portion of MLB juiced. Of course, because the only discovered streams of steroids supply were through Radomski, many teams were nearly entirely spared by the report, including the Red Sox and Yankees.

Now they'll use HGH. I guess we just need to live with this reality.

8 Responses:

"ben" said...

So what was the point of including the names? To give some context and validity to the anecdotes or something? He never explained.

J-Red said...

He just said he thought including the names was appropriate, but he did say many times not to focus on the names. I think he felt like showing the entire run of one ring was important to show that this stuff definitely happened.

It seems that BALCO and Radomski got caught, along with a couple pharmacies, but you can never predict how many operations were NEVER discovered.

Russell said...

There are players I would have expected to see (for example, Andruw Jones) that are not listed. I agree with J-Red that Mitchell has proved that it was rampant. Pretty much any player could have been doping. Even the little guys (Brian Roberts) and the pitchers (Clemens, Petitte, Gagne, etc) were doing it, so it's not just the sluggers like most people thought.

This is really bad for baseball. How do you guarantee a level playing field?

J-Red said...

Well, obviously NOT being in the report is not exculpatory. All the info came from a couple streams.

And I saw Andruw Jones play in Salisbury when he was with Macon. He was a beast then too (at age 19 I think).

"ben" said...

And yet, according to Bob Ley's reading of the Brian Roberts section, it is really flimsy. And even if you take it at face value, it doesn't sound like he benefited much, if at all, from steroid use.

Naming names was a mistake, I think. You can't expect people to look at these names and keep it in the proper context.

People (like me) will not read the 400 pages. We will just look for a list of the names.

J-Red said...

Keep it in context though. The Mitchell Report revealed that Larry Bigbie was told by Brian Roberts that he tried it a couple times.

That doesn't mean Roberts did it. That also means Roberts didn't do it extensively. It just means what was in the report.

"ben" said...

I repeat:

You can't expect people to look at these names and keep it in the proper context.

J-Red said...

I think the good news for many of the players is that they will be afterthoughts because of Clemens. That information was very specific, and the denial lacked an actual denial. That doesn't reflect well.

I suspect we won't hear from Brian Roberts, who will let the weakness of the evidence in the report speak for itself.

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