The Mitchell Report

[ih82lose]

What does the Mitchell report do to MLB? What will happen to the players mentioned? Will this finnaly clean up the game, or was there never a problem, and this report is a waste of time. Only time will tell what the outcome will be.

The Mitchell Report is the result of George J. Mitchell's 21-month investigation into the use of anabolic steroids and human growth hormone in Major League Baseball (MLB). The 409-page report, released on December 13, 2007, covers the history of the use of illegal performance enhancing substances by players and the effectiveness of the MLB drug testing program. Mitchell provides his recommendations regarding the handling of past illegal drug use and future prevention practices. The report names 89 Major League Baseball players who are alleged to have used steroids or drugs.

[Team PFT]

My opinion is that George Mitchell did his job but the Mitchell Report is just a sham.

Mitchell had no power to subpoena anyone and most of his investigation would never stand up in court. Even he said in his press conference to pay more attention to his recommendations than the name's on the list.

To me it is a shame baseball has fallen to such a low and all the report did was blacken the other eye of baseball. UNLESS all of baseball (owners, players association and commissioner) get together and devise a strict third party testing program nothing will happen.

It will be like the WWE saying they are steroid free because they test.

[TheDonk]

From what I understand, HGH is still undetectable, so there won't be an end to players using it until they find a way to detect it. With the other steroids, sure it'll scare the hell out of some of the players, some will still think they're invincible and keep abusing. I don't think they should have released the names of the players at all. I'm sure there are a whole lot more players that are using performance enhancing drugs that simply haven't been found out about, and yet those guys will get off scott-free while those named in the report will take all of the abuse. Something just doesn't seem right. IMO, they should have said, we've found 85 players that have very likely been using performance enhancing drugs, and we imagine there are a lot more that we haven't found out about. Since we know it's a widespread issue, we need to do something about it to make sure that all players stop taking these drugs. That should've been the deal, I just don't see any benefit in outing individual players after the fact, it only hurts baseball. The press would've beaten up MLB for not releasing the names, but MLB needs to take responsibility as well. If anyone believes that MLB officials haven't had knowledge about what's been going on they're just naive, everyone involved in pro baseball has known about this.

Now, what are they going to do about the really bad abusers...the NFL? It's the same deal there except worse.

[AceHigh Pino]

Major League Baseball should've exposed the problem a long time ago and done something about it instead of have the players union stick their thumb up their asses and blatantly tell the rest of the world "um, yea...we've got something to hide...but go ahead and dig anyways so we can all look even worse than we already do." Even if the NFL's top players were formally indicted like these 85 baseball players were in the Mitchell Report, fans wouldn't give two shits. It wouldn't be a surprise, and it would be a waste of time and money to expose something that's so obviously prevalent in football. Being that baseball is "America's Pastime," I think it was put more under the microscope than football ever was -- resulting in it being an easier target.

It also didn't help that Mark McGwire, Sammy Sosa, and Barry Bonds really brought the attention on the sport with their amazing single-season homerun records and obviously jacked-up physiques. Either way, it was something that was gonna be exposed sooner or later, and if most of you don't notice, the NHL, MLB, and NBA are among the top sports to be attacked by the media, sports writers, and its fans.