P.M. UPDATE: My estimation for Peter Gammons slipped a couple notches when I read this:
Not that most owners had enough time to really understand this, which is why it's fortunate that Mitchell did not go back to the period when George W. Bush owned the Texas Rangers -- which Jose Canseco and others have fingered as a performance-enhancing Wal-Mart -- because there is no way Bush had any idea what was alleged in Canseco's book.
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From what I’ve read, heard and watched about the Mitchell Report, one thing seems clear: the reaction is boiling down to the names.
The easiest story for the media is “the list” — the 85 major league players and a small handful of execs, mostly from our two local teams, fingered by a small circle of sources the Mitchell Gang was able to shake by the scruff of the neck — or more accurately, sources that other investigators flushed from the bushes. (Was it any surprise that several media outlets rushed to publish a fake list of names that circulated on the Internet the night before the real report was released?)
If Bud Selig has his way, the focus will narrow even further, to the names of the players only. He has pointed his finger, deepened his voice, and promised punishment.
Unfortunately Bud can’t, or won’t, punish himself, and the owners who let the Radomski-Anderson-McNamee sycophant clubhouse culture flourish won’t fire themselves. So it comes down to the names, from Clemens to Cust, from Herges to Tejada, who will bear the crosses of our schizophrenic puritanical Viagra-fueled outrage.
It doesn’t have to be that way. If all were right on our spinning ball of carbon-based life, Selig would immediately step down. It is so painfully obvious that he is responsible for this mess. I’m sure he doesn’t think so. Replacing guilty owners is a bigger problem: property holders have certain rights in this great land of ours, after all.
But front-office types like Brian Sabean who turned a blind eye should be publicly reprimanded — and not just by Ray Ratto, though his column this morning is a good start. Then, depending on the depth of their complicity, they should be fired. If the players are to be punished, their enablers, as the Chron puts it today, should suffer too. Let’s make it fair across the board. No scapegoating.
The other way forward is to do as the Mitchell Report implies: let bygones be bygones with a lot better testing in the near future. I can get behind that: no asterisks, no vilification, no suspensions for past actions. But taking a pass on legal, statistical and financial punishments isn’t the same as going scot-free. The obsession with the names will guarantee that. What do you think of when I say “Andy Pettitte”? Exactly.
So now that the 85 are tainted in the public eye (with undoubtedly many more to follow — you think “the list” is definitive? Ha), so should be their enablers. And the only way to hammer it home to the public, the only way we’ll have frank talk from the execs, owners and commissioner about their own complicity, is if Congress gets involved. Yes, there will be much grandstanding and windbagging, but can you imagine any other way to get Selig to take responsibility?
I’d love to see Bud apologize to baseball fans with a big humble mea culpa and a self-imposed pink slip. But it ain’t gonna happen without coercion, just like he’s done nothing else about drug testing without coercion. So in the meantime, may I suggest for the record books:
Commissioner* Selig.
