Mitchell Report
Contents |
[edit] Overview
The Mitchell Report was a 409 page report prepared by a committee selected by former Senator George Mitchell, who was asked by the Commissioner of Baseball, Bud Selig to report on the extent and scope of the use of performance enhancing drugs like steroids and human growth hormones (HGH) in MLB and MiLB.
[edit] The Process
Mitchell relied on limited direct testimony because, lacking any legal subpoena power, and receiving no cooperation from the Major League Baseball Players' Association (the PA), the unsealed and available record from other information vetted and published, and the public testimony of the few figures called up before Congress during their investigations into the use of such drugs in baseball.
[edit] The Result
The result of months of both interviews and compilation of source material provided, in the middle of December of 2007, a record which showed epidemic use of performance enhancing drugs, and named dozens of players as either limited or habitual users.
The report did an exceptional job of documenting both the use of the drugs by players great and small throughout the MLB system, and the large blind eye which trainers, managers, coaches, and the front offices at all levels turned towards that usage.
[edit] The Recommendations
The weakest part of the report were its conclusions and recommendations. Even though it was clear that dozens of superstar athletes had broken both the law of most states, Federal law, and the rules of baseball, and that they had been aided and abetted by their clubs, Mitchell's report called for no sanctions against any player or employee of a club, unless, in the view of the Commissioner, it compromised the game.
[edit] Analysis
The problem was that use of performance enhancing drugs compromised the game, on so massive a scale, that baseball's historic answers to such situations was difficult to execute for both practical and more personal reasons.
Instead of answering to the long and storied history of a game that has had zero tolerance for the fixing of games through other large-scale forms of cheating, like gambling, the Mitchell report recommended that all involved, players and coaches, the front offices and the leagues, should let bygones be bygones, and move on.
In practical effect, the Mitchell report identified the problem, and then recommended sweeping it under the rug as quickly as possible.
[edit] The Factors
In making their final conclusion, Mitchell and his group considered several factors:
- The Hatfields & McCoys - The owners and the players have been in a perpetual state of war since the early days of the game. Players were exploited badly by owners, then had to fight to unionize and to get the right to achieve free agency.
Oppressed for 74 years, the players have exacted their pound of flesh out of Major League Baseball by swinging the pendulum fully the other way between the mid-1970s and the early 21st century. Salaries exploded to such unrealistic highs that the ownership of a top name player at one club might exceed the full payroll of another club. The farm system, designed to keep the best and most able players on major league rosters, became bottled up because no multi-million dollar contract could be "sent down" to the minors for under-performance.
The distrust and near-hatred of both sides exploded first in the bitter strike in 1994 that shut-down the game extensively for the first time in its history and caused the disaffection of millions of fans.
Once the near-crippled game came back to life in 1995, both sides realized the impact that their feud had. To keep salaries escalating, and to bring fans back, the game had to be as big as it had been. Performance-enhancing drugs became the road to recovery for both sides, while still maintaining their feud.
The Mitchell Report took into account the poor state of relations between the factions that perform, own, and operate professional Major League Baseball and its farm system leagues and clubs.
- Better Living Through Chemistry - While cocaine and other illegal drugs had been a problem throughout the 1960s and 1970s, the classification of drugs known as performance enhancers that first became a problem in international amateur sports became a problem in baseball: Steroids and human growth hormones (HGH), as well as the weight loss supplement ephedra, helped players gain muscle mass, lose weight, and gain competitive edge.
The primary focus of the report was to document both the use and the human toll of the use of these drugs. It almost entirely focused on certain classifications, with a very weak address of cocaine, ephedra, and other drugs that have been commonplace, but were often late to be banned by the Commissioner's Office.
- The Weakened Commissioner's Office - After the owners were finally able to oust the last independent commissioner, Faye Vincent, in the mid 1990s, and replace him with one of their own, former car dealer and Milwaukee Brewers owner Bud Selig, the Commissioner of Baseball, whose office had functioned as the metronome that regulated baseball since the Chicago Black Sox scandal of 1919, totally lost all effect, as the MLBPA recognized the office as nothing more than another attempt by the Owners to gain unfair control of labor negotiations.
The Mitchell report, in its lack of enforcement teeth, while suggesting that the Commissioner was free to take action, kept Selig, who commissioned the report, off the hot-seat by failing to recommend suspensions or lifetime bans for any of the affected players. The report made no mention of action against the many trainers and field personnel directly or indirectly involved in facilitating the use of the drugs, and little or no mention of the owners or front office's responsibilities to report suspected rules violations to the Commissioner.
- O Brave New World With All These Lawyers In It - The report downplayed sanctions because to purge the system of players of their corrupt athletes would cost clubs millions in legal fees for arbitration hearings, lawsuits, and further investigations to document the players' true participation in the use of banned substances.
The Mitchell group calculated that such litigations would stretch the public relations disaster of this report out for perhaps a decade or more, would pit the PA even further from the owners in all future salary negotiations, and would cost baseball millions more in lost revenue both of ticket sales and merchandise.
- Fan Apathy - The report also recognizes that most fans of the modern game from the age that remember complete games and pre-sabremetrics baseball are getting older and far less vocal. The more potentially vocal fans, younger, grew up in the Dead Brain Era of post 1957 years of increased night games, television, free agency, sabremetrics, and use of performance enhancing drugs, all of which have had their impact on the game as it is played on the field and conducted as a business by both players and owners.
These fans have also grown up in a severely morally relativistic world where the shades of gray in life often aid and abet the more black-and-white wrongs. MLB owners and to some extent, the Mitchell group calculate that the large apathy of fans for the rule breaking, as long as a good product hits the field, would mean that most of the report would have little significance other than to the baseball purists who understood the impact that such cheating would have on the history and records of the game, and to the professionals internally who would be embarasssed by the report.
Buoyed by both increased attendance numbers in 2007 and by the apathetic response of the younger members of the media, for the most part, the "do nothing" approach was endorsed in the press conference of Selig and, to a large extent, the conference of Donald Fehr, president of the PA.
[edit] SUMMARY
While at the time of this writing the Mitchell Report is very fresh, and it is still yet to be seen what, if anything, the Commissioner will do to any of the parties involved, players or on the club/operations side, the initial reactions to the report were split.
The younger camp of the media went with "Much Ado About Nothing."
The older camp, and those more passionate about the history of the game, called it worse than the Black Sox scandal.
The report itself, particularly in its conclusions, was weak-willed and sought to appease the strong forces in ownership and the players union rather than heal the game which both sides have been pillaging for more than twenty years. It upheld the status quo, spit on the historic records and players who got the game to the level where it became the National Pastime, and prepared MLB for a dark future of business as usual, with continued testing, as long as fans continued to endorse and pay for the status quo.
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