I'm taking a pass on the Bears for just this week because we now have 8 months with nothing to do but try and fix them, and there's something else that's really ticking me off. Why doesn't the fact that the Mitchell Report is nothing less than McCarthyism in a designer suit seem to bug the crap out of anybody but me?
Have a large number of Major League Baseball Players used performance enhancing drugs over the past dozen years or so? Of course. Did the Mitchell Report do anything to enlighten us any more on this subject or unveil some new information. Basically no. All it did was name a bunch of players, in most cases based on absolutely nothing but the accusations of a couple of soon - to - be - convicted felons who clearly have an agenda in mind that has less - than - zero to do with the truth.
I have no sympathy at all for any of the players named in the Mitchell Report who are guilty, and I'm sure some are. But what about those who have been falsely accused? Because the one thing I can assure you is that when that many people are accused with little or no evidence against them there is always, always, collateral damage.
Had Mitchell done his report but not named the players he did, MLB could have owned the high ground and used public pressure to force the Players Association into a meaningful compromise. Instead, by naming names Mitchell and the folks who hired him, that would be the owners and Bud Selig, have backed the Players and their union leaders into a corner with no choice but to focus all their efforts on defending themselves and closing their ranks even tighter. When Selig stood at the podium the afternoon of the report's release and refused to accept any responsibility for the dilemma the game faces and suggest that he would use the report to punish anyone he feels like, it just demonstrated why the problem is further from rather than closer to being fixed.
And then there's the media's part in all this. About 3 or 4 hours before Mitchell held his press conference all of us on the air at this station received an e - mail with a list released by MSNBC of the players who would be named. Media outlets went with it everywhere. But when Mitchell's report came out several hours later there were a dozen or so players on the MSNBC list who in fact were not named by Mitchell. But instead of immediately issuing apologies to the incorrectly accused players, every media outlet I heard or read, including this radio station, tried to defend the MSNBC list and continued to treat the incorrectly named players as if they'd been found guilty of using Steroids.
Baseball and Sports just aren't that important when stacked up against the idea of a man being innocent until proven guilty. Isn't that the prayer and the belief we cling to as Americans that more than anything else makes ours the greatest country in the world? How is it possible that the players on the MSNBC list when in fact they weren't on the Mitchell Report list aren't entitled to an apology, and a presumption of innocence? Most of the guys Mitchell named were included based on nothing but the accusations of his drug dealers. If there was any evidence at all, no matter how circumstantial, wouldn't Mitchell have included the MSNBC guys too? Perhaps the players in question did do steroids as well, but with absolutely no evidence against them, how can they not be presumed innocent.
I just hope I'm not the only one out here in the blogosphere who thinks the laws and the Constitution of this country should take precedence over Bud Selig's witch hunt and George Mitchell's shameful failure to accomplish anything meaningful to deal with a real problem.
