King Kaufman's Sports Daily

On deck: The Mitchell report. The senator will name names about drug use in baseball, but will he mention management's role?

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Dec. 10, 2007 | Now that Barry Bonds has pleaded not guilty in his perjury case, which he did Friday, the next shoe to drop will be that of former Sen. George Mitchell, who's expected to issue the report resulting from his 20-month investigation into the use of performance-enhancing drugs in baseball.

The report is expected as soon as this week. Bet you can't wait.

Yes, it'll be shocking to hear that some of our baseball heroes may have been doing bad things with illegal substances. In the past few days we've seen Bonds in court and Baltimore Orioles outfielder Jay Gibbons admitting that he used human growth hormone, and that roughly covers the spectrum of playing ability in the big leagues. Gibbons got a 15-day suspension.

If Bonds is a doper and Gibbons is a doper, it's safe to say there are a whole lot of dopers, because there are a lot of guys in between those two.

But of course you knew that. We all did.

What we're all waiting for is to see whether Mitchell's going to be a straight shooter, pardon the choice of words. The story of the juicing era in baseball can't be told without talking about the complicity of the clubs, the willingness of the owners to at least look the other way when it came to steroids and the like because bulked-up ballplayers seemed to hit more home runs, and everybody, not just chicks, digs the long ball.

The best telling of that story, by the way, is "Juicing the Game" by Howard Bryant.

Mitchell is a management guy, a member of the Boston Red Sox board of directors. If his report says nothing about the enabling role management played in the juicing of America's pastime, we'll know his charge wasn't to get to the bottom of the performance-enhancing story, but to lay the blame on the players and their union, to name names, point fingers and win public-relations points.

The union played something of an enabling role too by fighting drug testing. One need only read Allen Barra's 2002 Salon interview with longtime union chief Marvin Miller to know why the union fought that testing, but without union opposition a testing program would have been instituted and some users would have been pinched years ago, not that that would have done much to solve the drug problem.

Next page: The players agreed to a drug-testing program in the '80s, but management threw it out