Today’s big doping news is the Mitchell report on steroid use in baseball. The highly anticipated (especially among the sports punditerati) 400+ page report was released this afternoon. I’ve had just a brief chance to peruse the document, which a coworker sent me about half an hour after former senator George Mitchell’s press conference. Mitchell and others (including Richard McLaren) have been investigating steroid use in baseball since March 2006, when the baseball commissioner, Bud Selig, asked the respected politician to look into the steroids mess and make recommendations on what needs to be done. Quite a lot of stuff in there to take in.
ESPN has good coverage of the report (although they repeat the same paragraphs from Roger Clemens’ lawyer in different sections of the story). Lots of names were named, but from what it sounds like, the evidence mostly falls into the he-said/he-said category. In Appendix D, there are a number of canceled checks from various baseball players to Kirk Radomski. As ESPN tells it, much of the information came from Radomski, who worked in the New York Mets clubhouse, and a former New York Yankees strength and conditioning coach named Brian McNamee. Another key source was Jose Canseco’s book Juiced.
Clemens’ lawyer, Rusty Hardin, was quick to respond to the revelations in the former senator’s report:
“I have great respect for Senator Mitchell. I think an overall look at this problem in baseball was an excellent idea,” Hardin said in a statement.
“But I respectfully suggest it is very unfair to include Roger’s name in this report,” said Clemens’ lawyer, Rusty Hardin. “He is left with no meaningful way to combat what he strongly contends are totally false allegations. He has not been charged with anything, he will not be charged with anything and yet he is being tried in the court of public opinion with no recourse. That is totally wrong.”“There has never been one shred of tangible evidence that he ever used these substances and yet he is being slandered today,” said Hardin, who called McNamee a “troubled man.”
Clemens, through Hardin, denied using steroids and was said to be outraged that his name was included. Did he dope? That depends on whose testimony you believe. But his was far from the only name in the report. Barry Bonds is in there, of course. And so are a number of other names connected to the Balco scandal.
According to ESPN’s article, however, most of the information about steroid use by the various players mentioned in the report comes from the time before 2003, when major league baseball started testing for the drugs. And apparently, the use of steroids is not limited to the star players. As the ESPN article notes:
“Those who have illegally used these substances range from players whose major league careers were brief to potential members of the Baseball of Hall of Fame,” Mitchell wrote. “They include both pitchers and position players, and their backgrounds are as diverse as those of all major league players.”
The baseball commissioner is promising action, telling reporters today:
“If there are problems, I wanted them revealed. [Mitchell’s] report is a call to action, and I will act.”
The cynic in me wonders if once this all blows over, whether anything of substance will really be done. In the meantime, as Joe Lindsey wrote yesterday, I’m also wondering if this could this be baseball’s Festina moment. Or is this just a passing story that will fall by the wayside? Time will tell.
Note: For those who are interested in reading the whole report, you can download it here. A word of warning, however. The file is six megabytes in size, so don’t try downloading it from a dial-up connection.
To me, the greatest contrast between cycling and baseball, vis a vis doping, is the strength of the player union. Fehr blocked all possible player involvement except for Giambi who had other issues. Thus the players union, instead of trying to make things between for the sport, looked solely after the narrow interests of current/past players. One could imagine Bettinni being a great riders union rep saying that taking DNA is an invasion of privacy (much less blood or urine!). I would argue that the baseball union may have served their own narrow interests but hurt the game and thus future members of their union. The same for cycling: who is a greater hero, Tyler Hamilton or Saul Raisin?
So for those of us, me included, who have asked for a stronger cyclists union, we should watch out what we wish for……
The player’s union for many years resisted testing in MLB. To me, this indicates that the union was aware that PED usage was to some degree common in baseball and the union was trying to protect those players. I can see a proper role for a union to see that a testing program is implemented in such a way as to protect innocent players from false positives and shoddy lab work, to shield guilty players from discovery and sanction is inexcusable, IMO.
From what I saw last night on the news, there is a mixed reaction among the public. Some people think that Mitchell was prying where he didn’t belond, perhaps because some baseball fans did not want the true nature of what happened/is happening to come out. Others were less forgiving of players named.
Should MLB go back and either erase or “asterisks” records? Depends in part on the nature of evidence against a given player. But there is a more interesting question with much broader implications: what action, if any, should be directed against team results that may have arisen due to PED usage by some of the players? Should a team be stripped of a championship because some of its players were “juiced”, even if the team was arguably unaware of that? Or, to change things around a bit, should a clean rider be stripped of wins because others on his team, whose help presumably assisted in his victory, were on PEDs?
I know that a business can be held liable for improper actions of employees (such as sexual harassment) if management does not exercise proper care to see that such actions do not occur and that proper action is taken when something is alleged to have occurred. I won’t go into all the details, but I think this is what is going to have to happen, not just in cycling with Slipstream et al, but in all sports. There was a piece of steroid use among HS athletes also on the news last night; it mentioned that in the SF area, at least, coaches will be required to take training on symptoms of steroid use. Whether they will take action if they see signs of steroid use is another thing, but I would bet there would be a good case for a suite if a coach turned his head to signs a player was using, and then something happened with that player. Could this happen in cycling? Could a rider sue a team/sponsor for health problems related to drug use while on that team? Remember, even if Discovery or T-Mobile no longer sponsor teams, they still exist as businesses and could still potentially be held liable for their actions or inactions while they were sponsors.
As an aside, I wonder if MLB will be held in the same contempt that many people hold cycling vis a vis drugs. At least cycling has been trying to clean up its act.
BSMB,
To me, regardless of whether Tyler Hamilton raced clean or not, Saul Raisin is the bigger hero in coming back from his injuries and regaining full function. The determination to do that goes way beyond, especially in terms of how far down one has to dig into his/her own suitcase of courage.
William,
You raise some very good points. I suspect that with the baseball situation things will be largely forgiven or forgotten by most fans come Opening Day.
Rant, the Mitchell report is a watershed.
Before the Mitchell report, it was possible for a baseball fan to say that it was just a handful of power hitters who abused steroids. If you didn’t live in San Francisco, or St. Louis, or Baltimore, you could pretend that it was the OTHER team that was abusing steroids. Not now. Now we know that there are guys on our favorite team (no matter where the team is located) who used steroids.
Before the Mitchell report, it was possible to blame the whole steroids mess on a few guys. Now we have too many names to make this about any one person or small group of people.
Before the Mitchell report, we might think that steroids were for the home run hitters who wanted to get bigger and stronger. Now we know that if anything, steroids was about the aging baseball player looking to prolong his career for a couple of extra years.
Before the Mitchell report, the face of doping in baseball was Barry Bonds, and except for San Franciscans, we all hated Barry Bonds anyway. Now the face of doping in baseball belongs to Roger Clemens, a guy most everyone respected.
Before the Mitchell report, you could argue that doping in baseball was not endemic. Baseball had a few guys who doped, but baseball did not have a doping problem.
Now, baseball is cycling. It’s a sport with a doping problem.
Larry,
It certainly has the potential to be a watershed. I think you’re right, but the real acid test is how fans react and how they continue to react in the future. Perhaps, as with the 1994 strike, fans will move away from the sport. (I pretty much gave up on baseball at that point, so I guess I’m 13 years ahead of the game here.) Time will tell on that, I suppose.
I can tell you from my own research that baseball’s drug/doping problem goes much further back than the Mitchell report. Steroids made their way into baseball by the mid- to late 1960s, as a matter of fact. And amphetamines, which Mitchell doesn’t address, were being used in by ballplayers as far back as the 1950s (and possibly earlier).
If baseball players are doping, any guesses about the NFL, NBA and NHL?
William, if any sport has a doping problem, it would have to be the NFL. If you just look at the size and speed of the people playing American football … no other sport places such a premium on size combined with speed.
The NBA? Well, those guys haqve gotten very large also — not just tall (and I don’t think PEDs can make you taller), but wide, and muscular. It’s a physical game, particularly underneath the basket. I hear guys on TV all the time saying that a pro player fresh out of college doesn’t have the size yet to compete with more experienced players. Where is that size going to come from?
I don’t know hockey as well.
I would think that baseball would have a smaller drug problem than the other sports. Size does not matter much in baseball. You don’t have to spend 5 hours a day in a gym to throw a 98 MPH fast ball or a curve ball that seems to defy the laws of physics. As for hitting, well, most power hitters these days are big guys, but it hasn’t always been that way. However, as Rant points out, amphetamines are probably a bigger problem in baseball than steroids. Baseball is a LONG season, there’s lots of travel — the need to stay alert and focused doubtless drives a lot of players towards “speed”.
Larry:
I think you’re right on as far as the NFL goes. I wonder what sort of testing program they have, do they test off season and would players be able to dope and bulk up during the off-season, then go off steroids during the season while still maintaining most of their build up while passing in-season tests? And does the NFL care?
There may be somewhat less of a problem in the NBA. As you mention, bulk is becoming a factor for centers and forwards, so there is probably some temptation for inside players to bulk up.
I have some familiarity with hockey, having been a fan when I’ve lived somewhere were there was a hockey team. It is in some ways a different sport. Size is not as much of a factor, hockey players in general are not all that much bigger than normal folk, at least when compared to football or basketball players. The big thing for hockey is that a player has to master 2 sports: hockey itself and skating. While speed and strength are quite important, they means littler without the skills to go with them. Except for the goon. Also the fact that hockey players are used in shifts, playing only a minute or two at a time before a new shift comes on; players certainly have to be in shape but endurance per se is not much of a factor, at least compared to basketball, where the starters play the majority of the game. So there is less temptation in hockey for endurance enhancements, like say EPO. Several years ago the NHL did a testing program and announced that all players were clean. Some people looked at that with some skepticism, but I think in fact that in hockey the drug problem is much less than in the other “big league” sports.
Baseball is also somewhat different in its physical demands than FB or BB. Endurance is hardly a factor at all, and size also is not much of a factor. But strength is, especially for pitchers and (would be) power hitters. The general opinion, for example, regarding Bonds is that as he got older, and perhaps his hitting for average was beginning to decline, he resorted to steroids to transform into a power hitter and thus extend his career. (Of course, it has yet to be proven in court that he did use steroids.)
There may also be other benefits for some PEDs. Pettis claims he used drugs for only a couple of days to speed healing of an injury and cortisone has often been used in treating injuries (as Landis did, with a TUE for it). Whether such use should be allowed is a good question; if so, it certainly should be under qualified medical care and with something on the order of a TUE to approve and document such use.