How the Mitchell Report has made baseball a better game

George Mitchell's investigation and report helped expose the history of the Steroid Era and pointed a way for the game to move forward. Anthony J.Causi/Icon SMI Tom Verducci's Mailbag Submit a comment or question for Tom. Name: Email: Hometown: Question: SEND

By March 30, 2006, baseball commissioner Bud Selig, against the advice of many of his closest advisers, knew he had to take the risk of springing open the lid to the Pandora's box of the sport. It had been eight years since an Associated Press reporter saw andro in Mark McGwire's locker (the moment Selig described as his epiphany when it came to performance-enhancing drugs in baseball), five years since Selig pushed through a drug-testing program for minor leaguers, and three years since the major leagues adopted such tests. But when SI published an excerpt from Game of Shadows that March, yet another signal that the story and the discovery of steroids in baseball were not going to stop, Selig knew baseball could not keep running from its past.

"Yes, I suppose there is something to that," Selig said about how the Shadows excerpt in SI cemented his decision. "[But] I already had made that decision. I knew we had nothing to hide. I just wanted to open up everything. Interview everybody you want. Find out everything you can."

Selig empowered his hand-picked special investigator, former U.S. senator George Mitchell, a friend of his and a man with a pristine reputation for diplomacy and fairness, to look inside the box.

"The more I thought about this," Selig said about how he came to order the steroid investigation, "the more I understood that I really didn't want anybody to be able to say, 'What are you guys hiding?' I was convinced of it, and I was almost virtually alone in thinking that way, but it didn't matter. I just thought it was the right thing to do. I thought [Mitchell] understood the baseball culture, and I had great faith in him as a person and in his reputation."

Of course, there was a lit stick of dynamite at the time that might have blown open the lid to the box, anyway. Three months before Selig announced the steroid investigation, federal agents raided the Long Island home of Kirk Radomski, where they discovered a paper trail and, with Radomski's cooperation, one fascinating narrative of how steroids and human growth hormone had become the rocket fuel of the modern ballplayer.

One year ago, on Dec. 13, 2007, Mitchell delivered his mandate in 409 riveting pages, recorded more prosaically as "Report to the Commissioner of Baseball of an Independent Investigation into the Illegal Use of Steroids and Other Performance Enhancing Substances By Players in Major League Baseball." The key word was "illegal." Mitchell understood the baseball culture well enough to know that players regarded their drug use as acceptable because the sport did not spell out specific "rules" against steroids, though he also understood the laws of the land that apply to all citizens.

The effect of the Mitchell Report often has been overstated, as if it caused players to quit steroids cold turkey. After all, no player on a 25-man major league roster tested positive for steroids in 2008. (The three failed tests belonged to 40-man designees.) Home runs were down by 815 from the all-time high in 2000. In truth, the cleanup phase had begun years earlier. The admissions of former MVPs Ken Caminiti and Jose Canseco, the shrinking of McGwire in front of a Congressional committee, the ruination of Rafael Palmeiro upon one failed test, the federal BALCO investigation that cost Barry Bonds his reputation, and the implementation of a testing program all cast a chilling effect on the PED climate in baseball.

Bodies were shrinking to normal size before Mitchell delivered his report. The Mitchell Report did succeed, however, as a kind of vehicle for closure that Selig had envisioned. It was unblinking enough not to be passed off as some in-house-produced pamphlet. (Truth be told, the work of the feds in turning over Radomski and Brian McNamee, the trainer for Roger Clemens, gave the report its true heft.) The Mitchell Report changed the dialogue about steroids in baseball, moving it away from a living problem to more of a history lesson.

Indeed, the 2008 season was the first one without regular noise about steroids since Caminiti made his admission to SI in 2002. The Mitchell Report helped in that regard, though the physical absence of Barry Bonds, baseball's pain in the asterisk, might have been just as responsible for the lack of steroid dialogue.

The Report has held up well. Nobody sued Mitchell. (Clemens has sued McNamee for defamation.) Baseball adopted most of his recommendations, including a kind of amnesty for named players, the establishment of an investigations department and an anonymous tip line, and further independence in the administering of the drug program, though it falls short of Mitchell's request for full independence and transparency.

"People can quarrel with that," Selig said. "I don't share that view. I talked to [MLB consultant] Dr. [Gary] Green, and he believes as we do that there is a lot of independence. No other sport has done more. I'm very comfortable with that. I meet with trainers and doctors and they basically concluded that we've cleaned it up. Part of the fact that it's held up so well is how we've reacted. There's no question we've come a long way. I'm very comfortable."

The Mitchell investigation was met with wide skepticism. Critics complained about Mitchell's place on the board of the Boston Red Sox and braced for a whitewash job. The players association steered its members away from cooperation, believing Mitchell would encounter dead ends. But the report that Mitchell delivered instantly became an important historical document.

The report's collateral damage impacted many players, especially the likes of Eric Gagne, Kevin Brown and Andy Pettitte, but none worse than Clemens. On the whole, though, baseball was better after Dec. 13, 2007 than before it, even accounting for the pain of the report's discoveries and its limited scope. (It never was meant to be comprehensive, nor could it be.) Baseball had reacted to the Steroid Era too slowly, but the Mitchell Report was a necessary reaction nonetheless. Meanwhile, the game in the report's aftermath continued to rediscover athleticism and fundamentals, while losing the preoccupation with brute force on the mound and at the plate that marked the Steroid Era. More importantly, a generation of young players, already raised in a testing climate in the minor leagues, learned that the worst price of using steroids is not a suspension but the loss of reputation. Bonds, McGwire, Palmeiro and Clemens, for instance, all of whom once seemed locks for the Hall of Fame, became non-persons in the public baseball community because of their alleged connections to steroids.

Drugs haven't gone away, though, nor will they. Players know that they can continue to use human growth hormone, which is meaninglessly banned; no reliable test exists for it. (Its benefit as a performance-enhancer, at least when used alone, is debatable, however.) One former baseball insider predicts that bodies will begin to grow massive again in a few years as the anti-steroid dialogue wanes and new methodologies and substances emerge. The Mitchell Report, as successful as it was toward the closure of an era, only underscored the need for more and greater vigilance in the era that follows.