The Mitchell Report and Baseball’s Delayed Reckoning

Kirk Radomski’s guilty plea gave baseball’s steroid investigation a formal point of contact inside the game. CBS reported that the former New York Mets clubhouse employee pleaded guilty in U.S. District Court to felony charges of distributing steroids and laundering money. As part of his plea deal, he agreed to testify before a grand jury if needed and to meet with investigators from baseball’s steroid investigation. The Mitchell Report identified Radomski as someone who worked for the Mets for a decade beginning in 1985 and said human growth hormone was the substance he sold to players most frequently until late 2005. That account did not establish every transaction.

Dated December 13, 2007, the Mitchell Report was titled an independent investigation into illegal steroid and other performance-enhancing substance use by Major League Baseball players. Prompted by revelations involving the Bay Area Laboratory Co-Operative, it concluded that for more than a decade players had used anabolic steroids and other performance-enhancing substances illegally, without identifying every user. Its judgment of the institution was direct: Major League Baseball’s response had been slow to develop and initially ineffective.

The report placed that response inside the league’s labor structure. In 2002, the Players Association and the clubs negotiated a joint drug program as part of the Basic Agreement. The report said mandatory random drug testing began in 2002 and formally started in 2004 after survey testing results. In anonymous survey testing conducted in 2003, 5 to 7 percent of participating players tested positive for performance-enhancing substances. The report noted that those figures likely understated actual use.

Formal testing was not the only evidence described in the report. Club officials routinely discussed the possibility of substance use when evaluating players. That practice connected the issue to the ordinary assessment of talent while the league’s testing system was still taking shape. The report’s conclusion about illegal use and its characterization of the league’s response therefore operated on two levels: what clubs were discussing and what the institution had formally put in place.

The report said 89 players had been named in connection with steroids or human growth hormone. The House hearing record listed Roger Clemens, Andy Pettitte, Mo Vaughn, Gary Sheffield, and Eric Gagne among players linked to steroid use; the list was a hearing description, not a judicial finding against each player. At that hearing, Commissioner Bud Selig said he would implement as many recommendations as possible and that discipline would be determined case by case. The investigation had produced names, but its consequences remained subject to the same league whose response the report had judged slow and initially ineffective.