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December 12, 2007

Watching the Watchmen

Scribbled by: Alex Nelson @ 1:53 am | Filed under: Articles

Over at ESPN, Howard Bryant provides a look behind the upcoming Mitchell Report, the findings of the steroid investigations conducted by former Senator George Mitchell on behalf of Major League Baseball which will be released Thursday. Bryant—who also penned a great book on steroids in baseball—does a phenomenal job with the piece, plainly stating what he’s gathered while avoiding wild speculation over what the report may or may not contain.

I’m reserving final judgment until the actual report’s been released, especially since so much of what Bryant mentions is fueled by anonymous sources, but I wouldn’t be at all surprised if Bryant’s piece turns out to be more interesting than the actual report. It’s quite lengthy, but well worth the read, and, unfortunately, it confirms many of my worst fears about the investigation.

From Day One, this investigation was doomed to fail, due to the appointment of Mitchell by Bud Selig. Don’t get me wrong; Mitchell’s credentials aren’t in question but rather his interests and biases. Bryant goes to pains to point out that Mitchell is not and never has been a minority owner in the Red Sox, but he does remind us that Mitchell used to (and likely will in the future) draw a salary from the team by serving in an advisory role. That’s a potential conflict of interest.

Like Bryant, I don’t believe Mitchell would actually blight his integrity by being less than forthcoming or dishonest here. I’m sure Mitchell considers that integrity as a badge of honor, and there will be far too much of a spotlight on his connections to the Red Sox to let them float by unscathed. The real problem is that it creates the perception of dishonesty and bias which undermines any authority and gravity his position as an independent investigator demands. It was a misstep by Selig, who should have seen this coming.

But then again, why should Selig see that as a problem? After all, he is the first commissioner to be appointed from the owners’ ranks, and that wasn’t a conflict of interest, right? If a used car salesman can be elevated from the owner’s ranks to deal with all franchises fairly and justly while serving as an unbiased representative of the sport to one and all, then surely a man with Mitchell’s résumé can be trusted in a lesser role, despite the fact that he’s an employee of a specific team. And again, it’s not that he can’t, it’s that some won’t, just because of where he’s coming from. In a way, Mitchell was a savvy pick. Who else would be respected by the media and government as a man of integrity while simultaneously being aware of ownership’s dangerous position here? But in another way, it was a tremendous oversight that a man with a different background would have foreseen.

The only good thing about having his authority undermined is that Mitchell didn’t have much to begin with. As Bryant plainly says, he can’t subpoena anyone or force anyone to talk to him. The Players’ Association was obviously not going to compel its members to discuss the issue, making the only people who could off-field personnel, who were threatened by the commissioner’s office with a $100,000 fine if they didn’t cooperate. Thus, the success of this investigation hinged on executives and trainers and strength and conditioning coaches speaking their honest opinions.

Unfortunately, that wasn’t going to happen, and I’m not sure this was a problem of execution or intention. The investigators could have handled this in two ways. They could have asked thoughtful questions, probing for points of weakness where needles and vials found their way into the game. They could have searched for causes and asked executives, trainers, and coaches for insights in hope of finding some solutions, some course of action. But those thoughtful questions never came. Consider this quote from Bryant’s article:

According to one manager’s account of his interview, the questions were pedestrian, almost naïve. Sometimes, he said, the exchanges were heated.

“I didn’t go in there with a lawyer because I didn’t have anything to hide,” the manager said. “They asked me if I’d ever seen anyone do steroids. I said no. They asked me how I thought the players’ bodies got so big, and I said the players were in the weight room day and night, so it made sense to me. Then he said to me, ‘Well, don’t you know that steroids combined with weightlifting can make you even bigger?’ He said it to me like I was dumb, so I said, ‘No, I didn’t know that.’”

And while you’re at it, take a look at this:

One coach said he recalled an investigator asking him outright to guess.

“The problem was, what did they want us to say?” said a team trainer who was interviewed by Mitchell’s investigators in 2006. “They wanted us to speculate. And I wouldn’t do that. They wanted me to say who I thought was using steroids. And when I said, ‘I don’t know,’ they would say, ‘Well, you work most closely with these guys. You work on their bodies every day. You weren’t the least bit suspicious when you saw their bodies change?’

“This was the kind of stuff I was most afraid of, because they didn’t ask me about specific people with specific information that they had. They asked me to guess. I said my guess was no guess at all, because what would happen to me if I said a guy was using steroids who wasn’t? What if I guessed wrong? Then my name is out there, I get fired, and I’m easily replaceable.”

Personnel were under the impression that these investigators were ill-prepared for an educated discussion on steroids. Perhaps these men didn’t take their duties in this investigation seriously enough, or maybe they underestimated how much knowledge was necessary. That would be a problem of execution. But maybe they weren’t interested in that discussion at all, and instead they wanted someone to blame and some names of juicers to appease the masses. That’s a problem with the entire aim of the inquiry. Was this a witch-hunt or the search for a long-term solution?

Like I said, maybe Howard Bryant didn’t get the whole story, and maybe the final report will have some true substance to it. But if it amounts to little more than a list of names five years removed from their playing days—guys former Met strength and conditioning coach Kirk Radomski may have implicated, like David Segui—then fans should not be satisfied. Unless those names are big enough, the public is not going to be happy with just names anymore. This shouldn’t be about punishing the guilty ghosts of seasons past, which are too numerous to worry about identifying, but rather about stabilizing the future. Soon, baseball will have to start making some actual progress, something that hasn’t really happened since testing began. The Mitchell Report should be a starting point, not an endpoint.

That said, I think many fans are losing their patience for the whole steroid scandal. They’re sick and bored of the names that don’t mean anything, and no one will be satiated with blaming GM’s, coaches, or trainers. But fans and the rest of baseball shouldn’t just ignore the whole situation, either; it shouldn’t just die here.

After all, that’s how baseball found itself in this mess in the first place.

Alex is a raving lunatic whose work can be found regularly here at Mets Geek. He welcomes comments and criticisms at kingblackfish@yahoo.com.

13 Responses to “Watching the Watchmen”

Comment posted by Tim in LA on December 12, 2007 at 4:21 am (#577440)
I can try to care about the steroids situation, but I just don’t. Baseball is a distraction. If you start taking it too seriously, you start to think about how unimportant it really is. We’re in the middle of a constitutional crisis, losing our liberties left and right, the economy’s tanking, and we’re about to run out of cheap energy if we don’t poison ourselves to death first…I want to think about baseball precisely because it’s NOT a big deal. Let’s talk about whether Santana is worth 4 pitchers + Gomez.

Personally, I don’t think Gomez is that great a prospect. The dude may be an amazing athlete, but his swing looks like he just picked up a bat for the first time last week. For the last year I’d been hoping the Mets were talking him up as trade bait, trying to shift focus off of the much-better Milledge. Guess I hoped wrong. Since I don’t care much about Gomez, I think I’d be okay with that deal…Pelfrey, Humber, Mulvey and Smith. Only one of the four will like likely end up being an impact player, and none as big an impact as Santana. Let’s do it.
Comment posted by Gus Gloom on December 12, 2007 at 8:45 am (#577444)

Alex doesn’t understand what the Mitchell Report is all about.

Simple: it’s CYA for Selig, just probably not a very good job of it.
Comment posted by rye jones on December 12, 2007 at 9:07 am (#577445)
I don’t really care if professional athletes are mainlining heroin in the dugout between innings. Baseball, like all sports, is escapist entertainment. It’s an internal league issue that is exhausting the public. Athletes are already putting their health and well being on the line enough as it is with the sport in and of itself anyway, to me this doesn’t make it much of a difference. …And it isn’t a role-model what about the kids issue. Fuck the kids, not everything in the world is for children and some things can be taken care of by parents explaining… ah, fuck it.

The Mets should’ve pulled the trigger unloading the farm for Santana. No doubt.
Comment posted by Lunkwill Fook on December 12, 2007 at 10:13 am (#577455)
This is pretty simple: they’re looking for someone to point a finger at and subsequently punish so that MLB looks good for cleaning house. Just because they can’t actually prove anyone DID anything doesn’t really matter. If three people say they think you did it, you did it.
Comment posted by yfern328 on December 12, 2007 at 2:03 pm (#577802)
Personally, I don’t think Gomez is that great a prospect. The dude may be an amazing athlete, but his swing looks like he just picked up a bat for the first time last week.

Tim, remember a guy a few years back named Jose Reyes. He swung the bat the same way, and has come very very far in that regard. Now Gomez definitely has that potential. Just give him time. He will be a combo of Beltran and Reyes, siding more with the reyes part.

Now i do however feel we should trade him for santana. Just not the 4 pitchers part. There was a nice article for once saying the mets are not desperate. the twins are.

http://bleacherreport.com/articles/4686-MLB-Minnesota_Twins-New_York_Mets-The_Twins_Must_Be_HIGH-111207
Comment posted by yfern328 on December 12, 2007 at 2:05 pm (#577804)
P.S. screw the Mitchell Report and the Supreme Court

Mets. Barry Bonds. 2008. RF.

haha j/k
Comment posted by Tim in LA on December 12, 2007 at 3:27 pm (#577868)
Tim, remember a guy a few years back named Jose Reyes. He swung the bat the same way, and has come very very far in that regard.

I disagree. Reyes always had a sweet swing from the right side, and as someone who only recently started switch-hitting, you had to assume he’d improve from the left. I’ll admit that their numbers look the same, and their speed is unmatched, but when you look closer, Reyes was further along in development by about two years, and had much better K/BB numbers…even as a hacker, Reyes was less a hacker than Gomez. I really hope I’m proven wrong, I’m just not all that high on the kid from what I see.
Comment posted by Wdwrkr35 on December 12, 2007 at 5:39 pm (#578096)
It is my opinion that congress has to do a full investigation of MLB using the RICO statue to get to the bottom of the steroids scandal. Not only did the owners turn a blind eye and Profit enormously they ignored the fact that steroids are in fact illegal drugs and in not reporting their use to authority have become complicit in their distribution. Everyone involved should be subpoenaed by congress and forced to testify or MLB needs to lose its monopoly exemption.
Comment posted by Wdwrkr35 on December 12, 2007 at 5:54 pm (#578103)
Every player that bought and used steroids needs to be arrested just like you and me would be if there was proof that we used illegal drugs. Why are these millionaires exempt from the criminal laws of the united states? Congress has to institute blood testing for all players where MLB pays for the testing and the samples are stored for future testing when the new designer drugs come to light. MLB is making billions they can afford it. If MLB doesn’t agree to it then congress needs to pull their business liscenses for the upcoming season. For the politicians to on one hand declare a war on drugs and then turn a blind eye because its business thats profitting is a national disgrace. I am forwarding this letter all the congress and senate members across this country along with as many newspapers as I can.
Comment posted by Chris in GA on December 12, 2007 at 8:48 pm (#578186)
35, that is what is wrong with Washington. It’s all about studying the past and doing nothing about it. There is hunger, wars, environmental issues and lots of other things going on that warrant congress’ attention more than this issue. I hate to be political but I just don’t see this being a “washington” issue.

Why is it that we have to dig up dirt on the past? I know what happened. We all know what happen. As you point fingers *once again wood, i love ya*, you forgot to point fingers at someone. Just not someone, but a who group of people who were in on this too. I’m not innocent, your not innocent and none of the millions of MLB fans are innocent. Why? I know you, you are a very smart guy. I consider most everyone here pretty smart. If any of us could look ourselves in the mirror and say, with all honesty, that they had no idea anyone was using during this time, I would probably call them a liar. In my eyes, we are as guilty since we are users of baseball and turned a blind eye towards this. We get pleasure out of this great game.

You know how this gets solved. Not by looking in the past but actually consentrating on the present and future, to prevent this in this great sport. The fact of the matter is that in baseball, this wasn’t illegal practice till only a handful of years ago. No one, even the hated Barry Bonds, should be prosecuted within baseball for this. I do agree with you that these million-dollar athletes, who have gotten caught buying this product or using these illegal products, should be prosecuted. However, we do not know the extent of the evidence. Plus, one athlete is pretty small potatoes. I believe the Gov’t wants to get the suppliers.

Not to get political again, the real issues isn’t the cheating; it isn’t the effect that cheating has on any of us. The people I fear about are the children. How do explain such a report to them? If congress wants to do something, how bout the kids.

Also

Congress has to institute blood testing for all players

Come on Wood! Is there probable cause for the gov’t to do this? *refrains from Bush joke* Your angry, I understand but this isn’t Cuba. Thank god it is not Cuba.
Comment posted by SoCal Metfan on December 12, 2007 at 8:50 pm (#578188)
Amen Chris. Well said.
Comment posted by Chris in GA on December 12, 2007 at 8:58 pm (#578192)
No one, even the hated Barry Bonds, should be prosecuted within baseball for this.

And I mean the athlete’s who mlb will try to go after, before roids were illegal in baseball.

I would like to also add that I have learned that everyone makes mistakes. People break the law and they should be punished. Now in baseball these past few years, since suspensions started being handed out, I have been disappointed about one thing. I can’t stand how these players have virtually no chance of redeeming themselves. I’m guilty of this too. I like to use Tim Raines as an example. He had an addiction that I believe, unwrongfully, will keep him out of the hall. One might say, he was a drug user. I see him as someone who turned his life around and was the NL answer to Rickey Henderson. That is what the American dream is all about. I think roid users will be forever tagged with that stigma no matter how hard they try to redeem themselves.
Comment posted by Alex Nelson on December 12, 2007 at 11:57 pm (#578336)
Well said, Chris. Your sentiments largely echo my own.

The thing to remember in all this is, you can’t just sweep in and announce systematic changes. Anything will have to go to the bargaining table, which is one of the necessities of labor law. The union cannot just give concessions without receiving something back from MLB. And MLB won’t want to give anything back.

And that’s the way it should work, which is the reason labor laws are structured the way they are. And if I were a player I’d be reluctant to agree to things like blood testing, too, which carries increased privacy concerns. Especially since the accuracy of that test is somewhat in dispute.

You can’t be haphazard about this, which is all the more reason why you want to keep Congress out.