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The release of the Mitchell report was typical senatorial bunkum, a lot of hard talk and rhetoric to gloss over what is really a boilerplate rehash of things already known. Gary Matthews Jr. and Bobby Estalella used steroids? You don’t say. Barry Bonds, too? I’m shocked, shocked. The only real earthshaker was trainer Brian McNamee’s claim that he injected pitchers Roger Clemens and Andy Pettitte with steroids or human growth hormone while they were with the Yankees. That’s direct testimony, not hearsay, but as McNamee and his Met counterpart Kirk Radomski, George Mitchell’s other primary source, are both facing criminal charges, with ample motive to exaggerate their stories, they aren’t all that reliable. Any reasonable person would look at them differently on the witness stand rather than just reading about them in the sports section. Otherwise, the list of player names the Mitchell Report delivered was based on circumstantial evidence: checks, phone records, order slips, and the like. Will Carroll of Baseball Prospectus called it “a document as flimsy as the paper it’s printed on.” Former Sox pitcher Jim Parque, for one, insisted he wrote checks to Radomski for supplements and herbs, not steroids. Mitchell was free to point a finger, but none of the accused answered his call. As my old Daily Southtown colleague T.J. Quinn said on ESPN, “What we learned today is George Mitchell had a lot of trouble getting people to talk to him.”
