Tuesday, April 11th, 2006,
by Fred (,
baseball, Bud Selig, steroids
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Bud Selig claims that ‘everything is fair game’ in the Mitchell steroids investigation
Selig defended himself and Major League Baseball in the face of questions Monday about baseball’s knowledge of performance-enhancing drugs such as steroids during the late 1990s. Selig said it was the report of Mark McGwire’s use of the legal supplement andro that first got him asking around about usage of all performance enhancers. Selig contended that steroid use was not as well-known as “revisionist” history is making out to be. He’s looked into it.And now he has someone doing a more thorough job.
Independent investigator George Mitchell, a former U.S. senator, “can go wherever the evidence takes him,” Selig said while attending Monday’s game at Busch Stadium. “What I’ve told him is that’s a judgment he has to make. He has to go wherever the evidence takes him - both in terms of time and people.”
Selig’s building a house of crap of a foundation of lies. Selig didn’t know about steroid and supplement use until it came out in 1998 that Mark McGwire was using andro? Then why did both the June 7, 1991 and May 15, 1997 memoranda from the Office of the Commissioner to all major league clubs state that baseball’s ban on illegal drug use by players “applies to all illegal drugs and controlled substances, including steroids and prescription drugs for which the individual in possession of the drug does not have a prescription”?
This just smells of cover-up. Selig still refuses to take responsibility for his role in the Steroids Era, and he’s appointed a Friend of Baseball to “investigate” steroid use by players.
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Friday, March 31st, 2006,
by Fred (,
BALCO, Barry Bonds, baseball, Bud Selig, George Mitchell, John Dowd, steroids
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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.
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Friday, March 24th, 2006,
by Fred (,
Barry Bonds, baseball, law, MLB, steroids
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A judge has denied Barry Bonds’ request to block profits of the book accusing him of using steroids.
Bonds’ attorneys say the book’s authors, publisher Gotham Books, the San Francisco Chronicle and Sports Illustrated, which published excerpts of the book, should be held liable for publishing “illegally obtained grand jury transcripts.”But Judge James Warren said free speech protections shielded the defendants from such accusations and that he thought Bonds’ lawsuit had little chance of success.
Notably, Bonds’ attorneys did not allege that the claims in the book were libelous. They base their request on an assertion that the book’s authors illegally obtained grand jury testimony. A lawyer for Bonds says that he doesn’t consider this to be a libel or slander case (audio link - ESPN insiders only). This is because everyone knows that the allegations are true. Bonds used steroids. the only questions are what baseball is going to do about it, and who else shares the blame.
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