Searching the Evidence - A Mitchell Report Review
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by Chachi
Allow me to climb atop my soapbox for a minute.
How many of you out there have actually looked through the Mitchell Report? How many have read the “evidence” against these players? I doubt very many people, if any, have taken the time to sit down and examine the document that Senator Mitchell and his committee put together following there 20-month investigation into the illicit use of performance enhancing drugs in baseball. Instead, we choose to get our information from 30-second sound bites on ESPN or back-page pundits who we routinely criticize. We call these guys cheaters and charlatans and scream for their names and statistics to be banned from our glorious and sacred record books. In reality though, doesn’t that make us no better than Skip Bayless or Jay the Joke?
(Climbing off soapbox, spraining ankle, getting ice…back to writing)
So I took my own advice this afternoon and actually examined the entire section of the Mitchell Report dedicated to Roger Clemens. I wanted to sit down and read the evidence myself and then form an informed opinion based on the facts presented. I wanted to see what truths were there to know and just how damning the “evidence” was. And you know what, I found the “evidence” is weak at best and entirely uncorroborated by anybody outside of Brian McNamee. Honestly, if they didn’t have the supposed eyewitness accounts of McNamee himself injecting Clemens, they would have nothing on him and the accounts they do have only range from 1998 to 2001. Even though McNamee was Clemens trainer up to this past season. Seriously, read the report. Here are some examples:
"Clemens never gave money to McNamee specifically to buy performance enhancing substances."
"…McNamee has no knowledge about whether Clemens used performance enhancing substances after 2001."
"Radomski produced four checks from McNamee that were…dated in 2003 and 2004, after McNamee said that he supplied Clemens, Pettitte and Knoblauch."
And my personal favorite:
"McNamee was quoted in a December 10, 2006 news article on steroids as having said: ‘I never, ever gave Clemens or Pettitte steroids. They never asked me for steroids. The only thing they asked me for were vitamins.’ McNamee told us that he was accurately quoted but he did not tell the truth to the reporter…"
So you are basically saying that your one and only witness to these transgressions is an admitted liar? That, and McNamee never said he gave Pettitte steroids just HGH. So is the article half true then? Also, the report goes on to say that McNamee never told Radomski, whom he bought some drugs from, names of any of the players he was providing steroids or HGH. It is basically McNamee’s word against everyone else's.
Now, most of you know that I am a Yankee fan, but beyond that I am a fan of a sport I have loved and played all my life. A sport I think is the greatest man has ever created and one in which I despise the idea of cheating. I’m not naïve enough to think that everyone is clean and I think it is highly likely that Clemens used something during his resurgence. But at the same time, show me the evidence. This article isn’t about saving Roger’s good name. It’s about showing how baseball treated this issue as a joke in the past and continues to deal with it poorly with this report. Also, I think baseball and the media need to examine the reckless fashion names were put into this report and the way in which they were released to the public. I thought us uneducated internet writers and bloggers were supposed to be the ones making outrageous claims with little basis in fact. Heck, maybe we are just as good, if not better than, anybody out there.
