On Dec. 13, former Sen. George Mitchell released with great fanfare his highly anticipated report on steroid use in Major League Baseball. The sports and broader media have since debated incessantly the various charges, counter-charges and implications of Mitchell’s findings.
Amid escalating rumors and several confessions to steroid use, in 2006, baseball commissioner Bud Selig (an owner
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Mitchell wrapped his report in the imperative to explain the dangers of steroid use to children, who may try to emulate the actions of their idols. It was also allegedly aimed at amateur athletes, who have already turned to steroids in astonishing numbers as a way to gain a competitive edge against other athletes. While child steroid use is a serious health problem, Mitchell’s faux “save the children” mantra does nothing to explain the rise and persistence of steroids in sports.
The steroids scandal, the report, and the ensuing media hysteria, has shifted the majority of the blame onto the players. Mitchell and others have only paid lip service to the notion that the owners and media established an entire steroid culture—driven by their insatiable need for profits—in professional baseball.
After the 1994 baseball strike, owners and the commissioners undertook a number of measures—including wrapping the ball tighter (so it would travel farther) and incrementally bringing in the fences—to increase home runs, and regain their higher profit margins. In addition, the sport began to take a casual approach to steroids, and drug standards—to which many commentators attribute the home run boom of the late 1990s.
Even if the owners did simply look the other way—an entirely doubtful assertion due to the hundreds of millions of dollars on the line—they certainly fostered an atmosphere that encouraged players to enhance their performances by any means necessary.
Some baseball media correspondents have since come forward to say that television networks consistently tried to downplay or silence the widespread rumors of steroid use.
As the number of home runs soared, fattening the bank accounts of team owners and network executives, the rumors were kept under wraps.
The use of steroids in the past several years has garnered quite a bit of attention, with high-profile incidents in baseball, cycling, tennis, track and football.
But implicated baseball stars have become the center of the controversy. Months of speculation about the alleged steroid use of Barry Bonds led to a generalized media frenzy in which reporters and some fans clamored for the Mitchell report to “name names.”
To their great satisfaction, 88 currently active and former MLB players are directly named in the report. Notable names like Barry Bonds, Roger Clemens, Andy Pettitte, Miguel Tejada and Eric Gagne were included. Some players admitted using steroids; others issued partial admissions; others flatly denied the charges. While Mitchell has said that individual reprisals are not the answer, he has cast a pall on so many players who, regardless of the amount of proof contained in the report, may never be able to clear their names.
Athletes face extraordinary pressures to be the best, the most consistent and the most durable. Their contracts and endorsements ultimately rely on it. Even the slightest sign of eroding skill, or only one bad year, can lead to their replacement.
Meanwhile, the team owners freely heap abuse and moral condemnation on their employees and former employees. They continue to sit in their gilded skyboxes counting the millions they have done nothing to earn, and citing their “love for the game.”
For the owners, the players come and go, but the profits flow all the same. It is unfortunate, although not unexpected, that Mitchell’s report did not name their names instead.
