To understand the importance of Senator George Mitchell’s investigation into baseball’s drug scandals, issued today after two years of frenzied anticipation, one must understand that Mitchell is not a neutral party.

Because the truth is usually right out in the open, it is no surprise to find a list of all the conflicts of interest that prevent Mitchell from credibly playing any independent role in baseball tucked away near the end of his voluminous report. As a consultant to Boston Red Sox ownership, a former director of the Florida Marlins, and former chairman of Disney at a time when it owned both the Anaheim Angels and ESPN, Mitchell is a member of baseball management as surely as anyone now living.

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More crucially, he served with former Federal Reserve chairman Paul Volcker, columnist George Will, and Yale president Richard Levin on the 2000 Blue Ribbon commission. That group produced a notoriously owner-friendly report on baseball economics that used cooked numbers to make a case for various mechanisms meant to suppress player salaries. It laid the ground for the biggest shift in power between owners and players since the 1970s, and set a template for how to do so: Establish a nominally independent commission with ties to Congress, propose owner-friendly policies, and then watch as Congress hammers the players into submission. In 2000, the Senate actually found time to hold hearings on competitive balance in baseball, and it didn’t take long for owners to force the union to accept many of the Blue Ribbon panel’s recommendations.

With this background, Mitchell is hardly an onlooker, uninvolved in the sport’s inner workings; he’s been one of the most powerful men in the game for many years. In his report, he blithely asserts that he is “confident that none of these matters affected my ability to conduct an investigation that was thorough, impartial, and fair,” but while his investigation may have been all of these things, his report is none of them. Self-contradicting, naive, and radical all at once, it could prove far more damaging to baseball than any tainted home run record.

For most, the main takeaway will be the list of 77 names of alleged drug users. Headlined by the Yankees’ Roger Clemens and Andy Pettitte and the Houston Astros’ Miguel Tejada, the list takes in everyone from three former Mets catchers to Eric Gagne, and in its sheer weight seems to confirm both the most salacious speculation about what Mitchell would uncover and the massive scope of the drug problem. More closely examined, it does neither, and in fact reveals how shockingly little Mitchell found.

Take those three banner names. Clemens is perhaps the greatest pitcher of all time, Pettitte was an anchor of the recent Yankees dynasty, and Tejada is a former MVP. Doubtless the allegations against them—and they’re credible accusations, backed up by documentary evidence or eyewitness testimony given on the record—will shock many.

Just last year, though, there were reports that former teammate Jason Grimsley had named Clemens and Pettitte as users in a federal affidavit. When the story broke, both offered odd, lawerly denials. Clemens didn’t deny the accusation, saying instead, “I have passed every test.” (The drug at issue was human growth hormone, for which there is no test.) Pettitte said “I’ve never used any drugs to enhance my performance in baseball,” which is an awfully specific way to say you haven’t used any drugs.

For his part, Tejada was accused of use in Jose Canseco’s 2005 book “Juiced,” and his name surfaced later that year when Rafael Palmeiro blamed him for a failed steroid test.

What Mitchell offers, then, is not new information, but lurid detail. (“Clemens said that he was not able to inject himself, and he asked for McNamee’s help… McNamee injected Clemens approximately four times in the buttocks over a several-week period with needles that Clemens provided.”) This detail came not from Mitchell’s own commission, but from the access the federal government provided to witnesses and suspects in ongoing drug investigations. Conditioning coach Brian McNamee and drug dealer Kirk Radomski were both interviewed with federal agents participating. Radomski, then working out a plea bargaining arrangement with a U.S. attorney, was warned that giving Mitchell false statements would subject to criminal penalty and a harsher sentence.

Federal law enforcement didn’t need to tie Mitchell’s inquiry in to a plea bargaining agreement, and would almost certainly not have done so for any random collection of citizens holding a private inquiry into steroid use. Such a decision is inherently political, involving as it does relative power, which was of course the genius of appointing Mitchell: it allowed baseball to leverage the credibility he earned in a career as a distinguished senator and diplomat into access to federal power. To what end, though, does any of this work?

Anyone who was paying attention knew a year ago that there was at least as much evidence against Clemens as there was against the disgraced Mark McGwire. What Mitchell adds are the stark details and mechanics of how drugs are used. But everyone knows this already, and learning the details of a player’s squeamishness about needles add nothing to public understanding. To expose such details is nothing but vicious, needless humiliation—especially when they’re sourced to someone who was under legal pressure to make you happy.

The same is true of nearly half the players on Mitchell’s list. Their inclusion is simply gratuitous. Sixteen names were simply scooped up from recent media reports on a federal investigation into online drug trafficking, eight were names that came out in the Balco scandal, and nearly a dozen more had previously come out one way or another. Some, like Ryan Franklin, had even failed drug tests. This leaves us with around 40 names who come as surprises. Some of them truly great players, like Kevin Brown; most are obscure journeymen, like Phil Hiatt. Against some of them there is impossibly credible evidence; against others, hardly anything at all.

The real takeaway here, though, is that despite using questionable means to questionable ends, Mitchell can present literally no evidence of his key claim that “the use of steroids in Major League Baseball was widespread.” This assertion is stated flatly, as fact, but his entire report contradicts it.

Mitchell at one point, for instance, references several lurid estimates of how many ballplayers have used steroids, ranging from 20% to “at least half,” to illustrate the scale of the problem. These are sourced to major league players and a coach. On the same page, though, he notes that a 2003 survey test revealed just five to seven percent of players were on steroids. Perhaps more to the point, in his own investigation he found credible evidence against 77 players—less than 2% of nearly 5,000 who took the field from 1988 to this year, roughly the time under consideration. Even allowing that Mitchell cannot be expected to have discovered every player who was using drugs, if six times as many players were using as he was able to discover that would still represent less than a fifth of the alarmist estimates he cites.

At some point, when you have spent tens of millions of dollars looking for something without finding it, you should consider that this may be because there was nothing to find. This possibility, on evidence of this report, simply never occurred to Mitchell.

A good word for a public document that draws conclusions directly contrary to those implied by the evidence it presents is propaganda. This is what Mitchell’s report reads as, and what it essentially is. Most of it is taken up by dreary recitations of evidence collected against the 77 accused and by a tendentious reading of baseball’s recent history with drugs that notably lacks any coherent perspective on the decades-old problem of steroid use in pro sports. (Football coaches were forcing players to gas before there was a National Football League.) It reads like a company history.

The history is easily dismissed, as it essentially presents baseball’s establishment as trying to do the right thing despite being stymied by the evil players again and again. The problem, in this telling, is that the owners have simply been too virtuous for their own good, that if they’d just not been so nice they would have been able to nab the missing 48.5% of drug-addled players that their very expensive investigation wasn’t able to find.

In this report, every foul caricature of the professional baseball players is given a full airing. “In 2000 or 2001,” reads one typical anecdote, “a visiting clubhouse manager working for the Minnesota Twins found a used syringe on top of a trashcan in the visitor’s clubhouse.”

“[O]ne former player told of annual players-only meetings during which teammates reminded one another that any personal information they learned during the season needed to be kept ‘in the family,'” reads another ominous, and notably anonymous, claim.

Baseball players do not, in fact, casually leave dirty needles laying around the locker room or reenact scenes from bad mob movies, but that is the impression this report leaves. Meanwhile, owners and the commissioner are forever unilaterally implementing this, or proposing this or that tough new curb on steroid use, only to be held back by the union. Owners are treated as being complicit in the drug scandal, but in the way of being too cautious and too deferential to a union that is depicted as warning players of pending random tests.
Mitchell doesn’t seem especially interested in how the testing program’s privacy protocols were broken, leaving the government with access to the results of purportedly anonymous tests, but he seems very interested in “the code of silence” among ballplayers.

This is basically propaganda, information given in a way meant to persuade rather than describe. So are those parts of the report that blame the suicide of teenagers on baseball players using drugs. So is the famed list, the main effect of which is to vilify the players, painting them all as tainted by the sheer accumulation of detail. This are not reasoned arguments or sound bases for policy.

Perhaps the majors really were infested with steroids. Perhaps there were a dozen Balcos, a hundred Kirk Radomskis. But to imply or even say this is not the same thing as proving it, no matter how much attention is paid to you or how distinguished and esteemed you are.

In the end, though, to pay too much attention to the report’s general dodginess is to miss its significance entirely. Earlier this year, in a letter to Mitchell, Representatives Bobby Rush and Cliff Stearns threatened to federalize drug testing in baseball if Mitchell’s recommendations aren’t carried out. Commissioner Bud Selig, unsurprisingly, announced today at a press conference that he would, in fact, act on all Mitchell’s recommendations. And Representatives Henry Waxman, Tom Davis, and John Dingell lauded the report and announced hearings into the scandal, at which they will no doubt insist that the players and owners find a way to do what Mitchell has deemed they should do.

This farce has played out before, in the war baseball fought over its collective bargaining agreement earlier this decade, and then as now there is a level on which the issue isn’t policy, but the intrusiveness of government involvement. Why should anyone care what Rep. Waxman has to say about steroids or competitive balance? Who cares?

The inherently bizarre spectacle of the commissioner vowing that baseball ownership will bow to federal pressure to carry out its own recommendations would be bad enough, but the nature of those recommendations turns farce into debacle. The Blue Ribbon panel at least forwarded vaguely plausible proposals; Mitchell’s main point is a call for a greater reliance on “non-analytical evidence,” by which he means hearsay and circumstantial proof, in determining whether a player is violating drug policy. This is a basically insane idea. He also wants baseball to set up an internal affairs shop (a good idea, actually), surveil player mail, test draft prospects for drugs, cooperate more with federal law enforcement, and set up a worldwide, year-round unannounced testing program capable of catching out players in dozens of countries in any season, at any time.

And here, finally, is why Mitchell’s complete lack of credibility matters so much. These radical measures would completely reshape baseball’s labor landscape. An insistence on implementing some of them could lead to a strike. And they were written by a member of management and former senator who (surprise!) insists that baseball management and the federal government be given more power over players in the name of combating a threat his report doesn’t even prove exists.

Corrupt in conception, inept in execution, this is in general a vile report. What decency there is in it comes from, of all people, Andy Pettitte. The ostentatiously religious Pettitte, who deserves and will receive a rousing ovation the next time he takes the mound at Yankee Stadium, will be scorned by many as a hypocrite, but according to the second-hand accounting of this report, he decided to use HGH because he thought it would “speed his recovery and help his team.” And what could be nobler than that?

Every one of Mitchell’s recommendations can be enacted, down to his insulting insistence on better player education (as if adult ballplayers were children, completely unaware of what drugs can do to their bodies), and they will do nothing to address the fact that players are competitive people who do drugs because they help them win. No amount of money, no politician, and no commission can or will ever do anything at all to change that.

tmarchman@nysun.com