Mitchell Report
The Report to the Commissioner of Baseball of an Independent Investigation into the Illegal Use of Steroids and Other Performance Enhancing Substances by Players in Major League Baseball, informally known as the Mitchell Report, is the result of former Democratic United States Senator from Maine George J. Mitchell's 20-month investigation into the use of anabolic steroids and human growth hormone in Major League Baseball. The 409-page report, released on December 13, 2007, covers the history of the use of illegal performance-enhancing substances by players and the effectiveness of the MLB Joint Drug Prevention and Treatment Program. The report also advances certain recommendations regarding the handling of past illegal drug use and future prevention practices. In addition, the report names 89 MLB players who are alleged to have used steroids or other performance-enhancing drugs.
Background
A former Senate Majority Leader, federal prosecutor, and ex-chairman of The Walt Disney Company, George Mitchell was appointed by Commissioner of Baseball Bud Selig on March 30, 2006 to investigate the use of performance-enhancing drugs in MLB. Mitchell was appointed during a time of controversy over the 2006 book Game of Shadows by San Francisco Chronicle investigative reporters Lance Williams and Mark Fainaru-Wada, which chronicles alleged extensive use of performance enhancers, including several different types of steroids and growth hormone by baseball superstars Barry Bonds, Gary Sheffield and Jason Giambi. The appointment was made after several influential members of the U.S. Congress made negative comments about the effectiveness and honesty of MLB's drug policies.Investigation
Mitchell's investigation focused on high-profile players, without investigating the role teams played. Mitchell reported that the Major League Baseball Players Association was "largely uncooperative". According to Mitchell, the Players Association effectively discouraged players from cooperating with the investigation. In a memorandum to players, the Association advised:Confidentiality was not an idle concern. The Players Association had agreed to anonymous testing in 2003, only to find out the list of players testing positive was turned over to the government.
Mitchell agreed to give Commissioner Selig an advanced copy of the report while refusing to do the same for the Players Association.
Only two active players were interviewed for the report. Of five players who were approached by the investigators for interviews because of their public statements on the issue, Toronto Blue Jays designated hitter Frank Thomas was the only one willing to be interviewed.
Kirk Radomski
, a former batboy and clubhouse employee for the New York Mets and a critical witness, provided most of the names that the general public did not know about. Mitchell was able to secure Radomski's cooperation through San Francisco, California, U.S. Attorney Scott Schools. Radomski had been charged with distribution of a controlled substance and money laundering and faced up to thirty years in prison. He reached a plea bargain that was conditioned upon his cooperation with the Mitchell investigation. Radomski pled guilty to those charges, received a sentence of five years’ probation, and was fined $18,575.Brian McNamee
is a personal trainer who was most notably employed by Andy Pettitte, Roger Clemens, and Chuck Knoblauch. He is a former strength coach for the New York Yankees and Toronto Blue Jays. The Mitchell Report alleges that McNamee helped acquire performance-enhancing drugs including steroids, amphetamines, and human growth hormone for some or all of the players he personally trained. McNamee told the Mitchell Commission that he began injecting Clemens with steroids in and that he continued to provide these steroids through.Larry Starr
Larry Starr was a trainer for 30 years with the Cincinnati Reds and the Florida Marlins. Starr was interviewed by Mitchell's investigators at least four times, but his information was entirely omitted from the final Report.Starr has spoken freely about the subject with the press. He told a reporter,
I have notes from the Winter Meetings where the owners group and the players' association sat in meetings with the team physicians and team trainers. I was there. And team physicians stood up and said, "Look, we need to do something about this. We've got a problem here if we don't do something about it." That was in 1988.In another interview, Starr said,
I don't totally blame the players. They didn't abuse the system. They used the system. The system was such that there was no testing so... the bad thing was it really put the medical people in a bad situation. If we couldn't test, there was no way we could accuse somebody point blank that they were using some type of performance-enhancing substance... Here's the position I took. If I can't test, if I can't do anything objective with them, what I told my players was come on in . If you've got any questions, we'll close the door, close the blinds, there will be no papers, no pencils and what do you want to know. And I'd tell them everything I knew... When Mark McGwire was discovered taking androstenedione, when that hit ESPN, four players walked into my office within an hour and asked, "Where can I get androstenedione?"Starr says that the first player he knew to be using steroids was doing so in 1984, and that multiple members of the championship 1997 Marlins team used steroids. In 2000, Starr found a bag of syringes belonging to Marlins pitcher Ricky Bones and reported it to his superiors, who sent the information up the chain to the commissioner's office. No action was taken; this incident was not included in the Mitchell Report.
Starr told a reporter, "Someone ought to ask Mr. Selig whether he had any suspicion at all. Was there any one time from 1990 to 2003 that you had any suspicion that people were doing something wrong or cheating? If he says no to that question, he must not have watched many games." Referring back to the 1980s, he told another reporter, "You'd have to live in Siberia to not know it was going on."
On the eve of the Mitchell report's release, Starr told the New York Daily News "From the conversations I had with them, I got the feeling they were very open to what I had to say. They were not just after names. I really felt like they wanted to hear the background on all this. I didn't feel like I was wasting my time." Neither Starr's information indicting MLB's decades of knowledge nor Starr's name appear anywhere in the Mitchell Report.
Report findings
The report describes motivations for its preparation, including health effects of steroids, legal issues, fair play, and reports that baseball players acted as role models for child athletes. For example, after the news broke in August 1998 that Mark McGwire had used androstenedione, a steroid precursor whose use was legal at the time, sales of the supplement increased more than tenfold; in 2001, the National Institute on Drug Abuse reported that 8% of male high school senior athletes had used androstenedione.Mitchell reported that during the random testing in 2003, 5 to 7 percent of players tested positive for steroid use. Players on the forty-man roster of major league teams were exempt from testing until 2004. One player is quoted: "Forty-man guys already have all of the club advantages, and then they could use steroids...it was not a level playing field."
According to the report, after mandatory random testing began in 2004, HGH became the substance of choice among players, as it was not then detectable in tests.
The report noted that at least one player from each of the thirty Major League Baseball teams was involved in the alleged violations.
Players listed
In all, 89 former and current MLB players are named in the report, including well-known players such as Roger Clemens, Andy Pettitte, Miguel Tejada, and Éric Gagné. Many of them are connected through a relatively small social network centering on Kirk Radomski.Recommendations
- Major League Baseball should use an independent testing administrator to improve their capability to investigate the use of performance-enhancing drugs, above and beyond the current urine testing program. Additionally, Major League Baseball should improve their methods of barring the drugs from the clubhouse.
- Major League Baseball should improve their efforts to educate the players and others regarding the grim health dangers that result from this drug use.
- When the club owners and the Players Association take up negotiations regarding the league's drug program again, they should be guided by modern and first-rate standards.
Conclusions
Mitchell presents his conclusions in five sections.
- Major League Baseball's 2002 response to steroid use resulted in players switching from detectable steroids to undetectable human growth hormone.
- The use of performance-enhancing substances by players is illegal and ethically "wrong".
- While players that use illegal substances are responsible for their actions, that responsibility is shared by the entire baseball community for failing to recognize the problem sooner.
- An exhaustive investigation attempting to identify every player that has used illegal substances would not be beneficial.
- Major League Baseball should adopt the recommendations of the report as a first step in eliminating the use of illegal substances.
Reactions
Donald Fehr, executive director of the MLB Players Association, also held a news conference where he expressed his disappointment that the union was not given a chance to read the report beforehand. He accepted some responsibility for the steroid problems but expressed concern about how the league would treat the players named in the report.
Roger Clemens has been deemed the list's standout name. The seven-time Cy Young Award winner issued a response through agent Randy Hendricks, saying "I want to state clearly and without qualification: I did not take steroids, human growth hormone or any other banned substances at any time in my baseball career or, in fact, my entire life."
The day after the report was released, then-President of the United States George W. Bush, a former co-owner of the Texas Rangers, said, "We can jump to this conclusion: that steroids have sullied the game." He said he had no prior knowledge or awareness of player steroid use. He added, "My hope is that this report is a part of putting the steroid era of baseball behind us."
Strangely enough, the Mitchell Report disappeared from both MLB and Baseball Reference, as Swing Completo LLC noted in their reference to the report.