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Report Blames All Corners Of Baseball

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By DAVE SHEININ, The Washington Post

Published: December 14, 2007

NEW YORK - A 21-month investigation into use of performance-enhancing drugs in Major League Baseball concluded Thursday that a culture of secrecy and permissiveness gave rise to a "steroids era" in the game that included some of its biggest names, most prominent among them superstar pitcher Roger Clemens.

The long-awaited report by George Mitchell gave a detailed account provided by a onetime team trainer who told the panel that he injected Clemens - a seven-time Cy Young award winner regarded as the greatest pitcher of the last half-century - with steroids and human growth hormone while he was with the Toronto Blue Jays and New York Yankees.

Clemens was one of 86 players named in the report, a list that included 33 all-stars, 10 most valuable players, and two Cy Young winners.

The report criticized team officials across the league who did little to police their own clubhouses and high-ranking officials in management and the players' union which, the report said, had little motivation to interfere with the surging popularity and economic growth experienced by the game over the past decade.

It spread blame for the rise of the use of anabolic steroids and human growth hormone in baseball among the players, team officials, the union and Commissioner of Baseball Bud Selig.

"Everyone involved in baseball over the past two decades - commissioners, club officials, the players association, and players - shares to some extent in the responsibility for the steroids era," the report said. "There was a collective failure to recognize the problem as it emerged and to deal with it early on. As a result, an environment developed in which illegal use became widespread."

Among the most prominent current and former players fingered in the report were Barry Bonds, Miguel Tejada, Andy Pettitte, Rafael Palmeiro and Tampa-native Gary Sheffield.

"Players who used performance-enhancing substances were wrong," the report said. "They violated federal law and baseball policy, and they distorted the fairness of competition by trying to gain an unfair advantage."

Clemens Denies Allegations

Clemens' attorney said the pitcher denied the allegations in the report. "He just emphatically denies everything in there," the attorney, Rusty Hardin, said.

The panel headed by Mitchell, a former Senate majority leader and federal prosecutor, was commissioned by Major League Baseball in March 2006 to address the steroids issue. The report runs 311 pages, plus attachments, and cost more than $20 million. It was based on interviews with 700 people, including 60 former players, and 115,000 pages of documents including receipts, canceled checks, phone records and e-mail.

Much of the information in the report was old, and merely rehashed previous media reports.

But the cooperation of two clubhouse insiders - former New York Mets clubhouse attendant Kirk Radomski and former Toronto Blue Jays and New York Yankees strength coach Brian McNamee, who testified to injecting Clemens with steroids and human growth hormone - brought about the report's most stunning revelations.

Mitchell also criticized baseball's leadership, chiefly Selig and union counterpart Donald Fehr, for "a collective failure to recognize the problem as it emerged and to deal with it early on." As a result, the report says, "an environment developed in which illegal use became widespread."

After the report was released, Selig repeated previous assertions that baseball leaders did all they could do to fight the steroid problem, but said he accepted Mitchell's findings, including those that focused blame on himself.

"If we were naive and missed some signals that we should have caught, I'll accept that responsibility," Selig said.

However, Selig also shifted the blame partially to baseball's powerful union, with which the league must negotiate most aspects of the drug-testing policy. "Do I wish we would've done more, quicker? Yes, and we would have. The things we were allowed to implement unilaterally, we did," Selig said.

Fehr, who heads the players association, said he had not had a chance to read the report. However, he took issue with the perception that the union dissuaded its members from cooperating with the investigation, which lacked the subpoena power to compel testimony.

"I did not encourage them tacitly or explicitly not to cooperate," Fehr said. "I gave them advice as to what the legal lay of the land was and urged them to seek their own counsel."

No Current Rays Named

Although no current Tampa Bay Rays players were implicated, 11 former Rays or former Rays minor leaguers were linked to Radomski either through testimony or canceled checks made out to Radomski.

That includes pitcher Todd Williams of Land O' Lakes, who played for Tampa Bay's Triple-A affiliate in Durham, N.C., in 2003 and most recently pitched for the Baltimore Orioles.

In the report, Radomski claimed to have sold Williams the steroid Winstrol once in 2001.

Williams' Tampa-based agent, Tom O'Connell, said his client was contacted only last week by Mitchell's investigators. The report said Williams declined to be interviewed.

Among the former Rays mentioned in the report, two came as no surprise: Jose Canseco and Jose Guillen.

Canseco's 2005 book, "Juiced," named many players as steroid users. Guillen recently received a 15-game suspension after the San Francisco Chronicle reported he had purchased about $20,000 worth of steroids and human growth hormone from 2003 to 2005.

The other former Rays implicated were pitchers Ryan Franklin, Jim Parque, John Rocker, Bart Miadich, Mike Judd and Denny Neagle, outfielder Adam Piatt and catcher Tim Laker.

The Rays did not comment on specific players, but issued a written statement: "Upholding the integrity of the game is paramount to the Tampa Bay Rays. We are supportive of Senator Mitchell's recommendations, and we will work in concert with the Office of the Commissioner to help implement them."

Former Rays first baseman and Tampa native Fred McGriff has maintained for years that he never witnessed anyone using steroids. But even he had his suspicions.

"Sometimes you would just look at a guy, you'd see him in spring training and he used to be real skinny," McGriff said. "And you'd go, 'Come on, man, there's no way he got that big just working out.' But unless you have proof, at least for me, you can't make those accusations."

McGriff said that the Mitchell Report would embarrass some players but that "the game of baseball will keep going on.

"People will be surprised by some of the names but beyond that, it's 'OK, what's next? When does spring training begin?'"

Mitchell's report made several significant recommendations that baseball should take to keep pace with the evolving development and marketing of illicit performance-enhancing drugs, including adopting a program that is fully transparent and overseen by a fully independent entity, and which includes year-round, unannounced testing.

Selig vowed to examine each named player on a case-by-case basis to see whether there is sufficient evidence to pursue suspensions. Those suspensions likely would mirror baseball's policy at the time of the players' alleged usage.

Tribune reporters Carter Gaddis and Joe Henderson contributed to this report.

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