Chip Carter's Newsroom

The Mitchell report is out. Basically the bottom line is it reinforces what most of us have known. That wide spread steroid use was rampant in baseball and that everyone in the game is to blame.

The Former Senator said this afternoon, "Everyone involved in baseball over the past two decades -- commissioners, club officials, the players' association and players -- shares to some extent the responsibility for the Steroids Era,"

Mitchell said. "There was a collective failure to recognize the

problem as it emerged and to deal with it early on."

Mitchell also said the biggest problem in baseball is no longer steroid abuse. The big problem now is HGH, (human growth hormone) right now players can use that and not worry about being detected, because HGH can not be detected in a urine test.

Some of the biggest names in the game are mentioned in the report, Barry Bonds, Roger Clemens, Miguel Tejada, Gary Sheffield. Clemens is second only to Barry Bonds in the number of times his name is mentioned. Brian McNamee (a former Yankee personal trainer) implicated Clemens in his testimony to George Mitchell.

But here's the deal..first, this report, the names involved, all of it helps the case of Barry Bonds. (if he admits taking illegal substances) his arguement will be that he needed to cheat just to keep up with others. In fact, George Mitchell backs up that line of thinking when he said that "some players felt compelled to start using steroids and HGH after seeing others do it and they didn't want to lose their job"

Honestly though, there is nothing, absolutely nothing in this report that is surprising. Major League Baseball is trying to wrap up the "Steroid Era" and move on. In fact, George Mitchell strongly feels and told the Commissioner that he didn't want to see any of the players punished for illegal substance abuse and there were over eighty players named including: Rafael Palmeiro, who tested positive for steroids, was among the former players named. So were Kevin Brown, Benito Santiago, Lenny Dykstra, Chuck Knoblauch, David Justice, Mo Vaughn and Todd Hundley. Mike Stanton, Scott Schoeneweis, Ron Villone and Jerry Hairston

Jr. were among the other current players identified.

Does any of this surprise you?? It shouldn't. When you see a pitcher like Clemens in his early forties still throwing 90 miles an hour, do you think that was just solid conditioning?? When you watched Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa go home run for home run, in a race that gripped the country? Did you think both players were clean?

Really Major League Baseball is to blame, the fans, the media, all share part of the blame. Records were being ripped up on a yearly basis, home runs were getting blasted all over the park, the high octane offenses were brining in fans, boosting attendance, driving merchandise sales, ticket sales. Do you not think that those who worked in the game didn't have a clue? In my opinion they did, they had to, there was no way not to know. Thats what George Mitchell means when he said: "Everyone involved in baseball over the past two decades --

commissioners, club officials, the players' association and players

-- shares to some extent the responsibility for the Steroids Era," Mitchell said. "There was a collective failure to recognize the problem as it emerged and to deal with it early on."

The problem wasn't identified early, because Major League Baseball didn't see it as a problem. What they saw was extensive media coverage, what they saw was fan attendance at an all time high, what they saw was baseball still grabbing headlines, positive headlines even as the NFL season kicked off. For the first time in a long time, baseball was getting higher play than the NFL as the home run chase cranked up....as Roger Clemens kept mowing down batters, as the Yankees chased World Series.

Then it all came crashing down, even though the reaction to Barry Bonds was a sold out stadium near the end of his home run stretch, collectively across the country, there was a who cares attitude? Fans aren't stupid, fans can clearly see when records are being decimated by players who look like a version of the Hulk hunched up over home plate.

So what was the bottom line to all of this? Simple, today was baseball's way of saying, there was a problem, we investigated the problem and we have the pieces in place, now have the pieces in place to keep the problem from growing. Remember HGH wasn't a banned substance until 2005. Remember that mandatory steroid testing on all players didn't start until 2003. So today was just a version of show and tell, throw in a few big names, let those names take some of the heat for baseball's slow awareness of the problem and then move on.

The records the players have set will stay, there will be no asterisk. But what I think can and will happen is that some of those players that were heading to the hall of fame, (Clemens, Bonds) may now be shutout like Mark McGwire was in his first year of voting.

To me, the best part of Mitchell's investigation was his carefully constructed recommendations for what baseball needs to do now. Mitchell wants that the drug-testing program be done by an independent group, that a list of the substances players test positive for be listed periodically by the testing organization and that the timing of testing be more unpredictable. Mitchell said at times, players knew in advance when they were going to be "randomly" tested.