Baseball to Blame for Mitchell Report

The names of the players that are being released in the Mitchell report will be at the heart of the news coverage. We love a sensational story. The naming of names. A who-dun-it.

It's really too late, of course. Who dun it, dun it. Baseball opened itself up to the possibility of widespread use of performance enhancing drugs by not lifting a finger to stem the tide when chemical labs became just as important as an off-season workout regimen. That was a long time ago now. And so it pays the price with another day of bad news. We should be talking about the coming season. Trades. Free agents. Teams holding their 'winter warmups' will have reporters coming around to ask steroid questions of the guests instead of talking baseball. Don't shoot the messenger. It's a hot topic.

Who's to blame? The players, sure, for trying to gain an unfair edge and putting their bodies at risk. But when there's big money at stake--lottery money really--it's human nature to grab any advantage you can to preserve a career or maybe lengthen one. Baseball's executives should have seen what was happening a decade ago and gone public. Embarrass the players union into going along with a testing program that had some teeth.

The NFL goes merrily along, making gobs of money with only an occasional news release about players doing things they shouldn't. No one ever talks about steroids. It seems to be a daily occurrence in baseball. The Mitchell report only makes it worse.

I guess we have to give them credit for finally trying to do something to rid the game of this stuff once and for all. Unofortunately because it was allowed to go on for so long (and still is), we'll never stop talking about it. History has been changed by the new home run records. We'll question every record set from the mid-1990s to until such time as we can be reasonably assured no one is taking anything that will allow them to play like Superman. That it was allowed to happen falls squarely on the shoulders of baseball.