Senator Mitchell’s highly anticipated report will be released this week. Advertised as an impartial inquiry into baseball’s drug scandal, one that will name names and offer the sport a way forward out of a sordid past, this report will at best be the meaningless result of a flawed, corrupt process. At worst it will be vicious propaganda that airs unproven slurs against players while painting owners as victims. Either way, it will do nothing other than prove that crooked timber cannot be made straight.

Because of his ties to the Boston Red Sox, Mitchell’s report deserves to be treated exactly as an investigation overseen by Barry Bonds and funded by the Major League Baseball Players Association would be. Officially, Mitchell is a paid adviser to the Boston ownership, and there is even good reason to think he is, or was, something more. In a 2004 interview with CNN, for instance, he referred to himself as a minority owner, and when the team was sold in 2001, the official press release referred to him as a member of the ownership group.

Whatever the exact nature of his interest in the team, Mitchell is so deeply sympathetic to baseball management that he doesn’t even
seem to know it. Last year, when asked at a press conference about conflicts of interest, he assured everyone that “if, in any way, anyone associated with the Red Sox is implicated, they will be treated just like everyone else.”

Mitchell seems not even to appreciate that the problem is not his relationship with one team, but his relationship to baseball’s power structure. Imagine President Bush charging Karl Rove with a blue ribbon inquiry into the war in Iraq, and Rove brushing away the appearance of impropriety by assuring the world that the White House political operation would get no special favor. That’s a more or less exact parallel to what’s going on here.

Absurdly, the farce is being taken seriously. Earlier this year, Reps. Bobby Rush, a Democrat of Illinois, and Cliff Stearns, a Republican of Florida, wrote Mitchell a ridiculous letter in which they essentially threatened to federalize drug testing in baseball if owners didn’t cooperate with him. “We appreciate your warning to team owners,” they wrote, “and concur with your recommendation for better cooperation with your independent investigation.”

That this commission can be presented by anyone as an impartial force acting apart from the game’s tsars is a testament to just how shameless politicians are, and to how deferential the press can be at its worst. This is doubtless an independent investigation in the sense that commissioner Bud Selig and baseball owners aren’t directly interfering in it. But then, they don’t have to.

If the issue were merely that congressmen were making spectacles of their ignorance or that people were taking a bit of damage control too seriously and using it as a pretext to rend their garments over the scourge of drug use, there would be no reason to be really outraged. But that’s not the case. A disturbing amount of government power has been deployed on behalf of the Mitchell commission.

One of the crown jewels of the report, to give an example, is reportedly a list of ballplayers who bought drugs from convicted dealer and former Mets clubhouse attendant Kirk Radomski. This was obtained as part of his plea agreement, negotiated by the Department of Justice. It is expected that this will be released to the public. Think about that: The federal government, on unknown authority, compelled Radomski to cooperate with Mitchell’s ridiculous inquiry, and did so knowing that this would result in Radomski’s unproven accusations becoming public, and did so without providing the accused a means to defend themselves.

This is disgraceful, as are many of the tactics used by Mitchell’s investigation. In February, his lawyers sent letters to baseball players demanding they sign medical waivers that would allow undetermined access to their medical records. In May, they reportedly approached the Baltimore Orioles directly for player medical records. It’s hard to find words for the sheer inanity of baseball investigating itself, brandishing stern and nearly coercive letters from Congress demanding that it give itself access to private medical data to which it has no legal right.

In February, Detroit outfielder Gary Sheffield, as he often does, got it exactly right. “This a witch hunt,” he told USA Today. “They’re just trying to collect a lot of stuff that doesn’t make any sense and throw the [expletive] against the wall.” There’s little doubt that this is what is happening; one simply hopes that there will be as much interest in why exactly Mitchell has Radomski’s supposed client list — and how he got it — as there is interest in the names on it.

tmarchman@nysun.com