So, without a doubt one of the biggest things to occur within sports in many a year is the Mitchell Report… and I guess as a sports blog I have to (?) have some sort of a post on it. I don’t pretend to one of the more learned baseball bloggers out there, but I do have an opinion.
I’ve read a bit of it (100 or so pages that have taken me quite a bit to digest), and whilst I think it’s a fairly important document, and one that MLB should take into account, but I am amazed with all the brouhaha over it.
Ok… ok. I know, a big deal ‘n’ all… but most of it appears to be hearsay.
Some trainer says that <insert name> got juiced so we’re expected to believe? I’m not really an optimist per se, and I think that the probability of guys using drugs to enhance their performance is high… but neither am I someone who’s going to blithely believe just on some guy’s say-so…
And the big name: Roger Clemens.
And the related issue: will he be treated as Bonds has been?
Well… no. And it comes down to Bonds’ character. Bonds pure ‘n’ simple treats people poorly, and in return, there’s a large degree of schadenfreude involved here. Clemens, whilst having the occasional issue, has by & large treated people relatively well.
Yes, he has done considerable damage to his ‘legacy’, but is anyone surprised?
Remarkably, his career got better as he got older, remind you of anyone? But people (or dare we say, ‘media’) find Clemens much more likable, thus he’ll get a lighter sentence in the court of public opinion.
The real losers out of this will be the guys who got named because of some guy with an axe to grind who used this as a means to an end. It’s staggering the amount of names that appear on the pages of the Mitchell Report because of what someone said to someone who then told someone who heard it over lunch who… well, you get the idea.
There’s a helluva lot of innuendo & hearsay in this, far too much for a document that cost so much, took so long to produce, and has been given so much weight.
And there’s the rub.
The worst of all this is that most people will swallow the Mitchell Report without a doubt as to the authenticity of the testimony.
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I wonder if I’d get slack for this, but I think roids, or HGH, should be used for injuries, football mostly, but under doctor supervision and for short periods. The reason being, is that yes it it does speed up recovery, but in football, a lot of these players end up having life long issues concerning past injuries. I mean players use other aids to try and speed recovery times, it’s just that roids can also be used to cheat, so it has that deserved stigma. I liken it to the medical field using opiates for medicinal purposes, but not medical Maryjane - not that I condone it’s use, and I also believe the medical properties for medical marijuana are overstated. And steroids are used in many forms for many different reasons, we just don’t like it in our sports, or so we say
http://www.google.com/
Ummm… weird.