King Kaufman's Sports Daily

Where's the former trainer who says he was interviewed four times and blamed management, not players, for the steroid mess? Plus: Clemens, bowl-game grad rates.

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Dec. 18, 2007 | Interesting point brought up by some people with nothing better to do than to post about this column's Monday edition on the Baseball Primer Newsblog: Where was Larry Starr in the Mitchell Report?

Who?

Starr was a trainer for the Cincinnati Reds and Florida Marlins before leaving baseball in 2002 to become an assistant athletic director at Nova Southeastern University in Fort Lauderdale, Fla. In late November, he told Florida Today writer David Jones that he'd been interviewed by former Sen. George Mitchell four times and expected to be contacted again.

He also said he refused to name the names of players he suspected of steroid use -- he said the first time he suspected a player was in 1984 -- and that he blamed baseball management and the players union equally for turning a blind eye to the steroid issue for more than 20 years.

"The commissioner's office, Bud Selig and that group, and the players association, Don Fehr and that group," he said, "they sit there and say, 'Well, now that we know that this happened we're going to do something about it.'

"I have notes from the Winter Meetings where the owners group and the players association sat in meetings with the team physicians and team trainers. I was there. And team physicians stood up and said, 'Look, we need to do something about this. We've got a problem here if we don't do something about it.' That was in 1988."

Though Starr had unkind words for the union, he defended the players themselves.

"My whole thing is, I don't totally blame the players," he told Florida Today. "They didn't abuse the system. They used the system."

"If Mark McGwire's hitting home runs out of the stadium, wouldn't you want to do the same thing?" he continued. "Especially when this stuff came from GNC, and they weren't told they couldn't use it. They weren't told they couldn't use steroids. So why not? Especially when people that were selling it to them were telling them there were no harmful effects."

Starr said that, with no testing in place, he couldn't accuse players of using something illegal, so he took the tack of offering to help them by telling them everything he knew about performance-enhancing drugs while protecting their confidence. "It really put the medical people in a bad situation," he said.

Now if you'll turn to your PDF copy of the Mitchell Report and search for the word "Starr," how many times does his name show up in the report, after at least four interviews in which he blamed the union and management but not players?

I also get zero. Interesting.

Next page: Bad idea for a speech topic, Mr. Clemens. Plus: How the brain power stacks up in the bowl games