Another useless baseball investigation into steroids
What the hell is wrong with Bud Selig?
An essay question, to be sure, but apparently the man, who has yet to utter a single word of contrition for his personal role in allowing baseball’s Steroids Era to go unaddressed for a decade, can only be spurred to action by publication of a book. First it was Juiced, which led to a lot of hand-wringing, a Congressional investigation and a close-but-not-good-enough steroids testing policy.
Now, with the publication of Game of Shadows, Selig has decided to appoint former Senator and itinerant negotiator George Mitchell to head an “independent” investigation into steroid use, including the connection between Barry Bonds and BALCO. It’s entirely unclear what this is meant to accomplish. If Mitchell confirms the obvious, that Bonds has been juicing since McGwire and Sosa stole the spotlight from His Royal Barryness in 1998, what exactly is Selig going to do? Suspend Bonds for using drugs that baseball neither tested for nor seemed to give much of a damn about? Put an asterisk next to Bonds’ 73 homers or his career home run record?
Its just more ass-covering from the ass-covering king. A far better use of resources would be an investigation of what the owners and commissioner knew, when they knew it, and why they didn’t do anything about it. Luckily for baseball, ESPN The Magazine already started that investigation:
[Selig’s] implication was clear. If team executives hadn’t known about the scourge of steroids, how was the commissioner supposed to have known? If baseball writers, who saw players up close every day, hadn’t reported the problem, how could they accuse Selig of turning a blind eye to it?
In short, who knew?
Who knew? We all knew: the trainers who looked the other way as they were treating a whole new class of injuries; the players who saw teammates inject themselves but kept the clubhouse code of silence; the journalists who “buried the lead” and told jokes among themselves about the newly muscled; the GMs who wittingly acquired players on steroids; and, yes, owners and players, who openly applauded the home run boom and moved at glacial speed to address the problem that fueled the explosion.
And stop already comparing George Mitchell to John Dowd, who headed the investigation into Pete Rose as Special Counsel to Commissioner Bart Giamatti. Dowd was a lawyer who served in the Justice Department as a trial attorney in the Tax Division and chief of an Organized Crime Strike Force in the Criminal Division. He supervised an internal investigation of the FBI and the investigation of Congressman Daniel Flood of Pennsylvania. He represented a senator of Nevada before the Department of Justice and the Senate Ethics Committee; an Air Force Colonel in the Iran Contra hearings; a senator before the Senate Ethics Committee; and a governor of Arizona in litigation with the Resolution Trust Corporation and in a fact-finding hearing before the House Subcommittee on General Oversight and Investigations, Committee on Banking, Finance and Urban Affairs, inquiring into the failure of the savings and loan industry. He served as an arbitrator for the International Court of Arbitration of the International Chamber of Commerce in Paris. In short, Dowd was an experienced investigator with a track record of taking on high-profile targets.
Mitchell, on the other hand, is a negotiator. He played a major role in brokering the Good Friday Accords in Northern Ireland and is a perennial contended for Secretary of State in a Democratic administration. He’s a former Senator and Senate Majority Leader, a body known mostly for deliberation and not for action. Further, Mitchell is a baseball insider. He serves on the board of the Boston Red Sox, and is Chairman of the Walt Disney Company, which owned a franchise until recently and currently owns baseball partner ESPN. He, therefore, has an enormous conflict of interest, and his appointment appears to be no more than window dressing for Bud Selig’s ongoing efforts to cover up the role baseball executives played in allowing the Steroid Era to continue unabated.
