In what has turned into one of the blackest days in the history of sport, the world today has learned of the findings of the Mitchell Report, the long awaited release of an investigation into rampant drug and steroid use in the world of Major League Baseball by former Senator George Mitchell.
The report has asserted that literally scores of MLB players many prominent, have been using steroids heavily for the better part of a decade. Among the players named have been the legendary 5-time Cy Young winner
Roger Clemons and Montreal-born 2003 NL Cy Young winner
Eric Gagne, who recently signed a multi-year contract with the Milwaukee Brewers.
Also named were such perennial all stars as
Andy Pettitte,
Miguel Tejada and of course
Barry Bonds, who this past season shattered
Hank Aaron’s Major League record of 755 home runs.
Mitchell, the former senate majority leader from Maine, was hired to investigate the growing allegations of steroid abuse in the sport that began back in 1998 when it was reported that Cardinals first baseman
Mark McGuire was using trazolone, a muscle building steroid, during his home run race that year with
Sammy Sosa that saw the power hitting redhead break
Roger Maris's longtime mark of 61 by hitting a grand total of 70 round trippers that season.
But it was a book by two sportswriters,
Game of Shadows which highlighted the alleged steroid use of Bonds and his connection with the controversial
BALCO {Bay Area Laboratory Co-Operative} scandal where Bonds now faces criminal charges that he perjured himself during testimony to a Grand Jury last year.
This book, which chronicled steroid use by Bonds and others, opened our eyes to not only the use but dangers of using such performance enhancing drugs. To his credit MLB Commissioner
Bud Selig took the bull by the horns and ordered this report that will blacken not only the sport of baseball but cast rightful suspicion on all major league sports and the degree that athletes will take to keep a competitive edge in what has become the huge business of professional sports.
As terrible of a day that it has been for baseball, and in that case all professional sports, my congratulations go out the strength and conviction to Selig and the majority of baseball owners who knew that the only solution to this serious and widespread problem was to open it publicly and then take strong and long lasting measures to clean it up.
Will the sport survive this far reaching scandal? Absolutely ,but it may take the next generation of fans to be able to look at America’s game and its players with the same love and respect that it garnered over the past century and destroyed by greed over the past decade.
