The Mitchell Report

Ken AshfordRed Sox & Other SportsLeave a Comment

I wasn’t going to address this, but I had the same thoughts as Volokh conspiracy blogger Ilya Somin (also a Bosox fan), so I might as well dive in:

Unfortunately, the prominence of Yankees stars in the Report and the near-absence of Red Sox stars raises the question of whether Senator George Mitchell, the Report’s primary author, was compromised by his status as a Boston Red Sox director. Was he deliberately targeting Yankees players and/or purposely overlooking offenses by Red Sox?

Somin goes on to answer his own question with a "no".  Mitchell, he argues, has "made a career of serving as an elder statesman/conflict mediator from Northern Ireland to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict", and is unlikely to risk that reputation because of his connection to the Red Sox.

Okay, I’ll buy that.

By the way, former Red Sox on "the list" include [Eric] Gagne, [Mo] Vaughn, [Roger] Clemens, Mike Stanton, Mike Lansing, Manny Alexander, Jose Manzanillo, Jeremy Giambi, [Brendan] Donnelly, Kent Mercker, Chris Donnels.

Glad to see Jason Varitek, Trot Nixon, and Nomar Garciaperra — rumored to be on the list — are in fact not listed.

I have little else to say about The Mitchell Report (full report — 409 pages in pdf format) other than what everybody else is saying (including the report itself).  The use of steroids and other performance-enhancing drugs is casting a pall on the enjoyability of the game, and it’s high time (past time, in fact) that baseball does something about it.  The report is a launching-off point for serious revisions to the rules, and hopefully everybody — owners, managers, and (most crucially) the baseball unions — will get behind it.