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#299 – The Mitchell Report – Dark Day or Light at the End of the Tunnel?
[I apologize in advance for the length of this post, and for its delay. I dictated it right after the Mitchell Report was released but my fog of pain and pain medication over the last several days made it impossible to clean up the voice recognition errors, which averaged about 1 per sentence. I think I dictated the original under the influence of percodan, which may have caused me to ramble a bit. I tried to clean that up in the editing but it's still pretty long.]
George Mitchell, the former Senate Majority Leader, released his report to the commissioner of baseball about the use of steroids. Mitchell repeatedly referred to baseball’s recent history as the “steroid era”. In all, it was a dark day for baseball. Paradoxically, it also wasn’t very surprising. Anybody even casually connected with baseball-and really just about anyone paying attention knew that some of the game’s biggest stars were using performance enhancing drugs. It’s not that big a leap to imagine that was only the tip of the iceberg. The Mitchell report confirmed this and probably underestimated the scope of the problem because of the difficulties in getting cooperation from current players.
From 1968 to 1994 I was a huge baseball fan. I went to games, watched games on TV, listened to games on the radio, and followed baseball in the news. But mostly, I considered myself a student of the game. I devoured books on baseball history. I visited the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown several times. I owned every edition of the BASEBALL ENCYCLOPEDIA, each purchased its first day of the issue. I was a member of SABR.
It 1994, I lost my interest in the game. The first reason, which had nothing to do with baseball’s troubles, was that I lost my allegiance to the teams I rooted for growing up. The second reason, which is significantly related to baseball’s current troubles, was the strike of 1994. I left and simply never came back. The third reason was that something smelled rotten in the state of the game. I didn’t think it had to do with performance enhancing drugs, but it was something. The design of ballparks to create offense? The composition of the baseballs to create offense? Something else designed to make the game artificially “exciting”? I considered myself a traditionalist, not in a sense that records weren’t made to be broken, but in a sense that something was wrong when there were suddenly dozens of players apparently more talented than Babe Ruth and Ted Williams. It offended me.
The Mitchell report, in a very specific, methodical way, documented what drove me from the game: steroids. Again, it has become obvious over the last several years that steroids and other performance enhancing drugs were responsible for the previously unheard of feats by a number of players, so it wasn’t surprising. But the report is so lengthy and so methodical that it’s hard not to look at and say, “wow, so this is how these guys screwed up something I loved so much and devoted so much of my leisure time to enjoying.”
So I thank George Mitchell for his good work and encourage people who loved baseball or love baseball to read the report. I read someplace that 1.8 million people downloaded the report for major league baseball’s web site within 3 hours of its release. This has been referred to as a dark day for baseball, maybe its darkest since the Black Sox Scandal of 1919. In some ways, this is much worse. It wasn’t one team in one season but every team for 10 and 20 years. (Actually, the Black Sox Scandal wasn’t just one team over one season but the culmination of crookedness involving just about every time for a decade and it, too, included the game’s biggest stars.) It’s like THE MATRIX where Neo discovers the world in which he’s lived his life is just a computerized projection on his brain. If you loved baseball over the last 20 yours, what you loved was a lie.
But it’s not really a dark day for baseball. This has been going on for a long time and we’re really discovering it now. Traditionally, the discovery of something rotten is the first and often most significant step in making things better.
Will the Mitchell report be able to make things better?
There has to be a gigantic change in the mindset of the players and the owners and I don’t think it’s going to happen. Unfortunately the Mitchell report may even cause the two sides to become more entrenched. This is where the murky issues of institutional bias and conflict of interest come into play and I believe George Mitchell, though he did an excellent job with much of his assignment, succumbed to the we-versus-they conflict that prevented this from being resolved decades ago.
Understand the alignment of the sides. First, it is owners vs. players. Second, the players association is their legal representative. The players association has no obligation to protect the best interests of the game or even, in many circumstances, the best interests of professional baseball players. Their job is to represent the particular people who are members of the union at that time. Third, the baseball commissioner is not a judge or an impartial arbiter. He is the legal representative of the collective of the baseball owners. His job is to represent their interests and implement their collective will.
Mitchell explained that everybody deserved some of the blame for the steroid era. He said that the owners and the commissioner, though occasionally raising the issue, never made it a high priority and never vigorously opposed the players association when they refused to advance the cause of freeing baseball from performance enhancing substances. Then, of course, there is the blame of the players who took the substances and the players’ association which vigorously opposed any form of testing or discipline.
This is all accurate. The difficulty however is emphasis. A total of two paragraphs, on pages 18 and 19, in the context of the players association’s refusal to agree to drug testing during the 1994 negotiations, is the extent of Mitchell’s documentation the owners “failure” to make the matter a high priority. An executive in the commissioner’s office recalled “at the time the drug program was not as high a priority as economic issues” and “Donald M. Fehr recalled that the proposal never even reached the main bargaining table during negotiations.”
That’s it for the extent of the owners’ culpability. In contrast, Mitchell devotes dozens of pages, nearly everything in pages 18 to 60, to the players association’s refusal to discuss the issue, to reach any agreement, to fight the owners and the commissioner’s office in every turn when it came to any initiative taken by the owners or the commissioner to develop or implement a drug policy or discipline players in connection with drug related problems.
It would be impossible for you to read the report and not get the message that Mitchell is placing most of the blame on the players association. This is wrong as both a matter of fact and human nature, and I believe it will be a serious and maybe fatal impediment to baseball resolving this problem in the near future.
What is the players association? It is a legal representative of major league baseball players. OK, there may be some differences between the union’s representation and a lawyer’s representation but the point is they have a specific fiduciary duty to represent the interests of those players. Not the game of baseball. Not baseball players in general. They represent the players at that time. If a player is involved in conduct that could be cheating or illegal or inappropriate – or there is even an inquiry into such things – the players association’s duty is to represent the players to the fullest extent possible.
The players association should no more acquiesce in drug testing than a defense lawyer would turn over the notes of his confidential conferences with his client. It would be a gigantic breach of our system of legal representation and fair play if your lawyer could somehow become an agent of the state, given they were supposed to be representing your interests AGAINST the state.
So when the owners or the commissioner suggested from time to time over the last 20 or 30 years the players be tested, there was absolutely no reason for the players association to agree. The association’s duty was to prevent it if any of its players were using drugs, or might be using drugs, or could be hurt by the implication they were using drugs, or could be hurt by the possibility of a false accusation. Submitting to drug testing isn’t something that anyone WANTS to do.
Mitchell goes on about arbitrators decisions that limited the power commissioner and about how the players association informed players who were about to be tested. The players association comes off as this evil influence, enabling the drug abusers. But the report doesn’t make clear that the players association was just doing its job; it really had no choice. It was extremely unfair for Mitchell to slant the report so that it appeared that the owners were in the right and would have prevailed without the pernicious influence of the players association.
I think the owners bear a much larger share of the blame than the players association or even the players themselves. Let’s take Roger Clemens as a hypothetical example. Clemens, with the Red Sox in the mid-1990s, was losing his effectiveness. Over a 4 year stretch he was 40-39 with a mediocre ERA and he missed a bunch of starts. It was at that time, according to the report, that Clemens began taking steroids. We went on to win 161 more games win 4 more Cy Young Awards.
Why do you think he did it? Obviously, it was in his selfish financial interest to take dangerous, performance enhancing drugs. Multiple $5-$15 million per year by a decade. More important, I believe, is the fact that Clemens and others like him probably didn’t want to lose his skill. Since elementary school, pitching was how Roger defined himself, and he was great at it. He spent nearly his whole life doing one thing and doing it better than almost anyone else in the world. Further, he spent his whole life competing. I can only speculate but it must be awful to have your life focused so narrowly on something and then gradually lose it. (I really don’t have to speculate much. The difficulties athletes face at the end of their careers is well known. They don’t get much sympathy in this age of fat salaries but the human dimension of the problem is still there.) So Clemens was offered an opportunity, in exchange for risking his future health, to extend his abilities, to continue succeeding. I think if you asked any star player from a previous era if he would make it different choice than Clemens, you would find fairly very few players who would categorically say they would not do the same thing.
You can say that Roger Clemens should have thought of himself as a role model. You can say that Roger Clemens should have paid baseball back for the great living it provided him by simply fading off into the sunset. But you’re kidding yourself. Roger Clemens was great that something, something millions of people admired him for being good at. He was willing to risk his health to continue doing it. These drugs were illegal and I’m not saying he should be admired for what he did. But he was enriching himself, prolonging his success, and continuing at what he considered his life’s work. Furthermore, he was being a GREAT employee.
I’m not saying we absolve the players association or the players themselves of responsibility. I just think it’s unrealistic to assess the blame without understanding their responsibilities and motivations.
Meanwhile, let’s look at the owners’ situation, occasionally raising the issue of drug testing only to be rebuffed by the players association. If you were Roger Clemens’ owner, and Clemens was packing stadiums during pennant races and winning you championships, would you be unhappy with that? Would you prefer to that he NOT pitch that well? If you thought maybe something was fishy with his performance, would you as an owner proactively find out the reason and put a stop to it?
Let’s face it: Roger Clemens was the best employee any owner could ask for. He was willing to risk his future health to advance the owner’s interest. Of course, he was advancing his own interest, too, but he was taking a gigantic risk to win those games, those championships for those franchises.
I can imagine the owners breathing a sigh of relief that there was NOT drug testing when those pumped-up-looking guys Sammy Sosa and Mark McGwire packed stadiums in their home run race of 1998. Their deeds, and those of several other players, were credited with bringing fans back from the 1994 strike. If the owners could have, do you think they’d have drug tested Sosa and McGwire? If they had evidence of illegal drugs, do you think they’d have relished yanking them from their lineups?
If you read Eliot Asinof’s EIGHT MEN OUT, about the Black Sox Scandal, you can see how conflicted the owners are about such things. Exposing the fix during the Series would have cost Sox owner Charles Comiskey several lucrative capacity-crowd World Series games. The discovery the following season cost his franchise another post-season appearance. And the decision to ban those eight players (including several of his biggest stars) from baseball ruined the franchise. It’s no wonder Comiskey was varied in his approach to the scandal.
It was the same for major league baseball owners during the steroid era. Where do you think George Mitchell got a lot of his information? He got it from team executives and employees, a lot of whom interacted with players on a daily basis. Let’s face reality: when your star player puts on 30 pounds of muscle and develops terrible back acne, the guys who see him every day in the locker room know what’s happening.
The major league owners, more than the players, are the ones who should treat baseball’s reputation as an asset. It is in their interest for the game to be clean. The players are concerned only with their own performance. They aren’t supposed to break the rules or the law but obviously a bunch of them weighed the risks and penalties against the benefits and decided it was worthwhile to take performance-enhancing drugs. The players aren’t supposed to weigh the integrity of the game in that calculus.
But the owners should. They have billions of dollars in long-term TV and endorsement contracts. Their franchises are worth hundreds of millions of dollars. It was their duty to look out for the good of the game and to make this is the priority issue it later became.
The owners have certainly proven that they’re willing to go to war with the players on economic issues. They chose not to go to war on this one, and it was actually strongly in the short term interest OF THE OWNERS for the players to use steroids. To refuse to acknowledge that is to refuse to acknowledge reality. Even worse, when the players and the owners get together to figure out what to do next, there seems to be little chance that of sides will admit they were both wrong and move forward. Clearly, the owners and especially the commissioner have this belief that they wanted to do the right thing and the players and their union caused this all to happen.
I had a very high opinion of George Mitchell and I still do. I don’t think this was the result of any conflict of interest or any plan to make the players and the union look like villains. But I think there is a clear institutional bias. The baseball commissioner has always wanted to have unilateral power over the players. But the commissioner is really just a collective will of the owners. The reason players organized was to prevent that from happening and so it should be the most important job of the players association to keep the commissioner from having that power. It seems to me that the Mitchell report used that tension to lay most of the blame on the players association and make the commissioner and the owners look falsely heroic. This ignores the reasons why the players and their representatives behaved as they did, as well as the reasons why it was in the owners’ interest to ignore the steroid problem for as long as they did.
Mitchell did a service by establishing facts out of what everyone knew but could not truly acknowledge. I’m just worried that he has undone that service by creating an atmosphere that will squarely place the owners and the players association on opposite sides when figuring out what to do next.
