King Kaufman's Sports Daily
The Mitchell Report's main accomplishment may be to highlight the bumbling of Bud Selig.
Read more: Drugs, Sports, Baseball, War on Drugs, Bud Selig, Major League Baseball, Steroids, King Kaufman, Sports Daily, MLB
Dec. 17, 2007 | The Mitchell Report is 4 days old now and I still can't figure out what it was supposed to do.
If the goal of the 20-month investigation into drug use in baseball was to remind us all that commissioner Bud Selig is a bumbling fool, then mission accomplished, but since Selig commissioned the thing in the first place, that probably wasn't it.
Selig has enjoyed a growing crowd of defenders and supporters over the last few years as Major League Baseball has enjoyed unprecedented prosperity, with both revenue and attendance breaking records. If the cash registers were silent on his watch he'd get the blame, so he has to get the credit when they're ringing. Fair is fair.
But his performance last week was classic Bud. At a time of crisis, the game needed a leader, a statesman. What it got was a petty operator, a sanctimonious hypocrite looking to make the world forget about his and the other owners' role in enabling the drug culture by punishing a few users. Baseball needed a Lincoln. It got a Nixon.
Former Sen. George Mitchell took on the role of statesman, urging Selig not to punish those players alleged in his report to have bought, received or used performance-enhancing drugs. "All efforts should now be directed to the future," Mitchell wrote. "Spending more months, or even years, in contentious disciplinary proceedings will keep everyone mired in the past."
Mitchell continued: "Perhaps the most important lesson I learned is that this is a serious problem that cannot be solved by anything less than a well-conceived, well-executed, and cooperative effort by everyone involved in baseball. From my experience in Northern Ireland [where Mitchell was a peace broker] I learned that letting go of the past and looking to the future is a very hard but necessary step toward dealing with an ongoing problem. That is what baseball now needs."
The time to say all this had been 20 months earlier, at the start of the probe. Had Mitchell gotten Selig to agree to an amnesty for all players, executives and team personnel who cooperated with Mitchell's investigation, he might have gotten a lot more useful information than the piecemeal goods he was able to cobble together from a couple of small-time operators under pressure from the feds.