Just about two decades after steroid use became rampant in Major League Baseball, MLB Commissioner Bud Selig has finally decided that it's time for the league to undertake an official investigation.
Color me unimpressed.
There's only one real target of this investigation, and his name is Barry Bonds. That's because everyone else who used steroids has already been driven from the game. And now that the league's big money sponsors are bailing, now, and only now, does the Commissioner think that the game needs to be cleansed. And you can bet that the league wants to drive Bonds out of the game before he gets a chance to make a final assault on Hank Aaron's career home run record.
To do that, baseball has turned to one of its own, former U.S. Senator George Mitchell, a part owner of the Boston Red Sox and a member of the Board of Directors of the Walt Disney company, the owner of ESPN, arguably the league's most important television partner.
If I had to ask Mitchell a question, it would be this: What are you prepared to do?
Because it won't be a real investigation if he doesn't go as far as the evidence takes him. I'm about half-way through Game of Shadows by Mark Fainaru-Ward and Lance Williams, and while it's clear that Bonds is an absolute jerk, it wasn't as if the San Francisco Giants organization didn't realize something was amiss when he appeared in camp one Spring swelled far beyond life-sized. From the book:
When Bonds shows up at the Giants' spring training camp the change in his physique is startling. His weight has increased from perhaps 210 to 225 pounds, and almost all of the gain is rock-hard muscle... To teammates, writers and fans in Scottsdale, especially to Giants' management, Bonds' appearance and performance raise a fundamental question: What has he been doing in the offseason? Nobody bothers to press the question.
Peter MacGowan, will you raise your right hand...?
And had baseball been serious about cleaning up the game, that would have been a good place to start. But it didn't. Just like when evidence of Mark McGwire's use of androstenedione surfaced in the midst of his assault on Roger Maris' record in 1998:
Many in baseball establishment react with outrage -- not at McGwire, but at the AP reporter [who first wrote about McGwire's use of Andro]. Acting baseball commissioner Bud Selig promises baseball will commission a scientific study about the health effects of performance-enhancing drugs. But he makes clear he will take no action regarding McGwire and Andro. His deepest fear is the story will develop into a scandal that will ruin McGwire and kill baseball's lucrative renaissance just as it is beginning
Funny enough, but I think that decision is defensible on one level. After all, McGwire wasn't violating any provision of the collective bargaining agreement when he took Andro, which was only officially banned years after it was revealed he was using it.
And that's the one thing that Bonds and McGwire have in common with everyone else who took steroids: Nobody broke any of baseball's rules. And it's an absolute joke now to pretend that an investigation connected with MLB is anything more than an ex-post facto exercise in CYA.
But for baseball to investigate Bonds now after he helped them make billions of dollars, it's not just hypocritical, it's a publc exercise in rewriting history. And that shouldn't be allowed to happen.
