Mitchell Report Shouldn’t Be Basis for Legislation
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.
Yesterday, Rep. Bobby Rush, a Democrat of Illinois and head of the congressional subcommittee charged with oversight of sports, announced at a press conference in Chicago that he intends to introduce legislation handing the force of law to the recommendations made in George Mitchell’s infamous report on baseball’s drug scandal.
“The Mitchell Report found widespread use of steroids and other substances in Major League Baseball,” Rep. Rush said in a release. “I intend to introduce legislation to address these problems and adopt recommendations of Mitchell’s Report.”
It is not true that Mitchell’s report found widespread use of drugs in baseball. The only hard proof he offered was an anonymous testing survey that found 5–7% of players were using drugs. Despite his use of lax evidentiary standards, his list of the names of drug users contained less than 2% of the players active during the time under consideration. Higher figures were rough guesses for which no evidence was offered.
When pressed on this point, Toure Muhammad, a spokesman for Rep. Rush, cited a figure, 20–30%, which does not actually appear in the report. When twice asked about the well-documented conflicts of interest that make it inappropriate for Mitchell, a longtime member of baseball management, to be taken as a source for neutral advice on matters relating to the sport’s labor policies, Muhammad responded twice by saying, “Senator Mitchell’s integrity is beyond reproach.”
There you have it. What the report actually reports matters no more than its lack of credibility and independence, and to question it is to “doubt the honesty of a great American,” as Muhammad put it. This has been the implicit message of much of the treatment Mitchell’s shameful report has received from the government, central baseball, and the duller precincts of the press — but it’s still nice to see it put so plainly.
Because Rep. Rush is quite likely to follow through on his threats to write absurd laws, it may be worth looking at the actual recommendations Mitchell made. They break down into three broad categories.
One class centers around baseball’s need for “a compelling and greatly enhanced educational program that focuses on real-life stories as well as on all the risks involved in the use of performance enhancing substances.” I ridiculed this in an article last week, but as a reader pointed out, there is no reason to do so. Many ballplayers, for instance, may be unaware that there is literally no credible evidence that human growth hormone helps performance. If baseball or Congress wants to mandate that all players be made aware of this, it is probably a good idea.
More important, though, according to Mitchell, “The Commissioner’s Office should place a higher priority on the aggressive investigation of non-testing (so-called ‘non-analytic’) evidence of possession or use [and] enhance its cooperation with law enforcement authorities.”
By non-analytic evidence, Mitchell means the sorts of hearsay and uncorroborated evidence presented in his report. Brian Roberts of the Baltimore Orioles, for instance, was named as a user because someone said he talked about steroids with his roommates. Given a sufficiently lax standard, such proof could see a player suspended for 50 games, or even barred from baseball.
By “enhanced cooperation with law enforcement authorities,” Mitchell means that baseball should use the methods used in his report, such as getting federal prosecutors to lean on defendants. With some initiative, one supposes, baseball could convince the National Security Agency to wiretap all its players — or at least the non-American ones and those doing business with foreign suppliers.
Finally, Mitchell proposes a variety of changes to baseball’s actual testing system. Some of these changes are good ideas; there is no real reason why baseball’s program shouldn’t be administered by an outside agency, for example. Others, such as the idea of year-round random testing, are logistically difficult but perhaps worth doing. The main one, though, centers on HGH.
In his report, Mitchell is fixated on this substance, and Rep. Rush, who claims it “is now the drug of choice for athletes,” follows his lead. It has never been shown to be performance enhancing; there is no proof of widespread use among ballplayers; there is no reliable test for it, and the test that does exist not only requires blood be drawn, but only detects HGH used in the last 24 hours. (Scientists have been about six months away from a urine test for the stuff for about as long as the average Manhattan carpet shop has been going out of business.)
The very fact that it can’t be detected is probably the reason for HGH’s appeal to moralists. After all, they simply know that baseball has a massive drug problem. If there is no convincing proof that this is so, it must be because players are using some secret liquid. Mitchell thinks it should be tested for, and Rep. Rush thinks that should be the law.
If we are to take him at his word, then Rep. Rush wants to make all of the sanctified Mitchell’s ideas law. He apparently thinks MLB should be able to routinely use federal law enforcement capabilities in investigating its employees; he apparently doesn’t think that physical evidence should be necessary to judge a player guilty of drug use, and he thinks that this is necessary because a few dozen players may have committed crimes on par with those of a pilled-up housewife. That’s what he said, that’s what he certainly seems to mean, and that’s what you’re saying if you happen to say that Congress ought to pass a law.
tmarchman@nysun.com