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VDesai
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Baseball holds its breath for The List to be released
Thursday, December 13, 2007
By BOB KLAPISCH
RECORD COLUMNIST
George Mitchell plans to release his report at 2 o’clock today. Bud Selig is scheduled to hold a news conference 2½ hours later.
The reactions will range from shock to anger, to threats and counter-threats. Then again, maybe George Mitchell's 20-month steroids investigation will be stopped dead cold by a wall of cynicism. Already there are enough detractors who say Mitchell's detectives will unveil a flawed, incomplete list of juicers – up to 80, according to initial reports -- without any actual proof of wrongdoing.
Regardless of where the pendulum rests, this will be a sea-change moment in baseball history, particularly in New York. According to one industry official, "several" prominent Yankees will be named by Mitchell in his 2 p.m. news conference in Manhattan. The official, who spoke to a third party who'd seen the final report, predicted, "It's going to be a rough day in the Bronx" after the identities are made public.
No Mets from the current 40-man roster are named, according to the same source.
The ramifications are almost too vast to digest, much less predict. No one knows how Bud Selig will react when he holds his own news conference 2½ hours after Mitchell's; he'll be making the toughest decision of his professional career.
Does he punish the game's biggest stars retroactively and risk dismantling baseball's golden era? When attendance is at an all-time high, and annual revenues exceed $6 billion? Or does Selig act as a healer, accept Mitchell's recommendations for change and move forward?
Whatever path Selig chooses this afternoon will cement his legacy. Just as Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis will be forever remembered as the commissioner who banned eight players suspected of involvement in the 1919 Black Sox scandal, including Buck Weaver and Shoeless Joe Jackson, it's up to Selig to decide if the cheaters will be suspended, or even expelled, and their accomplishments and awards wiped from the record books.
Landis, like Selig, was dealing in a gray area, since the eight Sox players were acquitted in court of any wrongdoing. Selig will have a similar challenge, since Mitchell's investigation has been dogged by questionable data and, without the power of subpoena, virtual non-compliance from the faction that mattered most – the players.
According to an ESPN.com report, not a single major-leaguer cooperated with Mitchell's investigator except for Jason Giambi. It took the explicit threat of punishment from Selig for the Yankee slugger to submit to questioning, but by and large, at the insistence of the players' association, Mitchell was stonewalled. Instead, he had to rely on two questionable information streams:
The first was Kirk Radomski, the former Mets' clubhouse attendant who pleaded guilty in April to illegally distributing steroids, HGH and amphetamines to players from 1995-2005. Part of Radomski's plea agreement required him to cooperate with Mitchell, but his testimony created no direct link between the sale of the banned substances and actual use.
Simply put, the players whom Radomski named can admit they purchased drugs from him, but chose not to use them. Or, they can say they took them without knowing they were actually using steroids. That defense, no matter how flimsy, cannot actually be disproven and could potentially handcuff Selig -- just as the fact that Radomski's testimony is tinged by his need to please the feds and lighten his sentence.
Mitchell also leaned on the teams' support personnel, particularly the trainers who had daily contact with the players. That might've seemed like a logical tactic, except that the trainers were encouraged, if not pressured, into guessing the identities of the cheaters in their clubhouses. One trainer, who spoke on condition of anonymity to ESPN.com, said, "They wanted us to speculate. And I wouldn't do that. They wanted me to say who I thought was using steroids."
To his credit, Mitchell's case will be bolstered by information gathered by the Albany, N.Y., district attorney's office, during an investigation of a pharmacy based in Orlando, Fla. But that could only net a fraction of the users, according to one major league source who said, "All [Mitchell] got was the tip of the iceberg." And therein lies a deeper problem: Just how deep could Mitchell really dig?
There are some baseball people who've questioned Mitchell's credentials from the start, pointing to his affiliation with the Red Sox. As one of the team's directors, Mitchell insists he had no equity stake in the Sox, although he was being paid by the team before the investigation and will resume drawing checks upon its conclusion. There's also clear evidence Mitchell is a Red Sox fan: he was caught by a Newsday reporter this spring at Fenway wearing a Sox jacket and hat, obtaining autographs for his son.
Of course, Mitchell, a former Senator from Maine, had an impeccable reputation in Congress before his retirement. Selig appointed him with the belief that a Mitchell-led investigation would convince lawmakers that baseball is finally operating with transparency on the steroids issue. But executives never completely got over Mitchell's ties to Fenway. As one official said on Wednesday, "For everyone's sake, there [had] better be some Red Sox players on that list."
Either way, the moment of truth has arrived: whether you give The List any weight, or dismiss it as a bi-product of politics and score-settling, it's time for baseball to plot its future course. Punishment or appeasement? Repudiation, or an acceptance that the past 15 years will be forever known as The Steroid Era.
Do we take the cheaters out with the trash? Run them out of the game altogether? Or find a way to make sure the game's stars never again come from a laboratory? It's the choice of a lifetime. History will be made today.
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12/12/2007 4:25 PM
