Is This A Joke?
I am about as disillusioned as it gets at the moment.
I'm not entirely surprised about Clemens, but Pettitte is unfortunate. I take solace in the fact that, apparently, it wasn't an ongoing, systematic effort to buck the system a la Clemens or Giambi, but a one-time lapse in judgment in 2002. He might be a cheater, but at least he's not on the same level as these other guys. That's something.
But I'm just as disappointed in the report itself, for a few reasons. For one thing, it's basically the McNamee and Randomski show. So they had the goods on a couple NY trainers and got them to roll. And that's it. No one from Chicago, or Boston, or Detroit, or St. Louis, or Florida, or California.
Predictably, the report is shallow and incomplete. As Pete Abraham says, issuing a report on steroids with one mention of Sammy Sosa is like writing a history of rock and roll with one mention of the Beatles.
And even many of the guys that ARE named are questionable, if you go through and actually read the report. Brian Roberts is one who comes to mind: the case against him is basically "a teammate of his, who never thought he did it before, said that he did once or twice, a year or two later." Come on, if you've got nothing better than that, do you really need to drag a guy's name into it?
But despite all that, you've got MLB and those idiots at ESPN treating it like it's the final word.
And I'm not even going to get into the conflict of interest side of it. I don't care if the guy is a former Senator or the goddamn Pope. There are COI rules that govern other bodies like federal advisory panels for a reason.
Baseball let the problem go on and on, and now this is what we get in the final tally? As a baseball fan I feel like they're insulting my intelligence, and speaking as a Yankee fan, we're definitely getting the short end of the stick.
Ultimately, though, I guess I have only myself to blame, for expecting the report to be halfway decent. What a friggin joke. I don't even know why I bother paying attention.
2 comments:
Yes, the report comes down hard on NY, but the Commission was working with what it had.
I think we need to look at the report as just another piece of evidence that, and I can't believe I'm doing this, to quote Jose Canseco, "proved nothing, it just proved what we already knew."
What we know is that MLB is in serious trouble.
What is on the surface an indictment of dozens of players, is in reality an indictment of baseball's total lack of control of itself.
Remember, the report was commissioned by MLB for MLB and penned by people of MLB. And what MLB often does is to throw it's own players in front of trucks.
Contra-Costa Times columnist Monte Poole wrote this analogy when Barry Bonds was indicted:
"Minutes after Commissioner Bud Selig concluded a two-day owners meeting Thursday by bragging about the robust state of Major League Baseball -- which in 2007 broke the $6 billion barrier -- a grunt-level employee named Barry Bonds was crossing a major intersection on his path down Scapegoat Road."
I think the Mitchell Report should have been spun like this: "These are the names of player we got from basically two sources. It is wise to think that there is a lot more going on than what we dug up (albeit poorly)."
Olbermann on the Mitchell report:
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