John Blanchette: Report injects more hypocrisy

So what did we learn from the Mitchell Report?

Well, that Human Growth Hormone can’t help you throw a baseball from second to first without nailing a little old lady sitting in the box seats.

We know this because one-time Yankees second baseman Chuck Knoblauch was fingered by former Senate majority leader George Mitchell on Thursday in his 409-page stink bomb on baseball as one of 90 players who scuzzed up the game with steroids, HGH and weak-willed judgment. You may remember that Chucky’s throwing arm prompted a run on souvenir batting helmets by ticket holders in the first-base bleachers.

What else? Oh, that some of these Injector Gadgets got less bang for their anabolic buck than others. Yes, that means you, Dan Naulty.

What could be more pointless than the Dan Naultys of the baseball world shooting steroids? Courtney Love enrolling in charm school?

And just what, really, was accomplished in the 20 months Mitchell spent picking through baseball’s garbage for this not-at-all-comprehensive report? Closure?

Only if you’re talking about the door to the Hall of Fame slapping Roger Clemens in his injected ass on the way out.

That was, actually, the one tangible triumph of Thursday’s sturm und drang – that it gave Barry Bonds a similarly bigger-than-life playmate in the sandbox of public shame. If Tabloid America does its job on Clemens, Bonds’ defenders will have to fold their race cards and admit that it’s a character issue, period. And all because a strength-coach buddy rolled over on the Rocket.

Clemens should have asked Bonds for Greg Anderson’s phone number. That guy can keep his mouth shut.

But other than – or maybe because of – the shock value of seeing the likes of Andy Pettitte, Miguel Tejada and Eric Gagne implicated by varying degrees of hearsay, the Mitchell Report and the immediate spin/fallout were mostly exercises in disingenuousness and wasted motion. It would be nice to say the report at least confirmed what had long been suspected, but other than some personal admissions by minor characters the document was short on unshakeable corroboration.

Eardrums and eyeballs were whipsawed by all the commentary and reactions Thursday, but there was one talking head – it may have been David Cornwell, one of ESPN’s legal analysts – who tunneled straight to the absurdity.

“Why,” he asked, invoking a medical metaphor, “would you order a test that doesn’t change your course of treatment?”

Which is exactly what baseball commissioner Bud Selig did in assigning Mitchell his task.

Mitchell did make a number of recommendations that would tweak baseball’s drug policies and procedures – and Selig insisted “I will act.” But the most substantive of those – turning testing over to the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency or some independent body – cannot be implemented by Selig without negotiation with the players union, which surely won’t be an easy sell after it was ambushed by Mitchell’s report.

Besides, Selig has used up his credibility as a man of action. He was no less a foot-dragger in instituting policy than the union. Mitchell’s report was full of examples of a don’t-ask-don’t-tell culture in baseball’s front offices and beyond, as when the Marlins turned over the discovery of a bag of syringes and steroids in pitcher Ricky Bones’ locker to the commissioner’s office and was told, “We’ll take it from here.” Except that the first anyone heard of it was Thursday.

It was all too clear that Selig had long ago settled on his reaction to Mitchell’s findings – especially since he had no trouble admitting in his press conference Thursday that he hadn’t yet read the report, never mind that he was given the earliest advance copy.

He wanted to “look to the future,” he said – except that he was ready to start evaluating disciplinary action against players named. Nor was he willing to offer any concession of his own culpability in baseball’s steroids era, even as Mitchell assigned him some.

“Hindsight is wonderful,” Selig said dismissively.

At least union head Donald Fehr said his group should have “done something sooner.” Like management, the players are motivated solely by self-interest – but that should include their physical well-being as well as their financial health.

As a result, baseball has a belated and weak-gummed drug policy, pretty much in line with the rest of this country’s professional team sports. And that’s plenty for the American sports fan, who loves to savage track and field – which actually stripped Marion Jones of her Olympic golds – and the Tour de France as punch lines for their drug cultures. Meanwhile in the NFL, Shawne Merriman gets suspended for drugs – and appears in the Pro Bowl the same year.

No, the victims in baseball’s drug culture are not the customers who don’t much care and in fact came back to the game in droves when juice drove home run numbers to the heavens. The victims, Mitchell noted, are the players who didn’t use. But they’ve already been victimized, and Thursday’s report didn’t make them feel any better.

This was no Dowd Report that buried Pete Rose or even “Eight Men Out” that fleshed out the motives behind the Black Sox Scandal. This was a bloated timeline salvaged only by a couple of locker-room dirtbags with no place to turn, just as a leak-happy lawyer and a mad mistress drove the Bonds story.

In baseball, you can’t tell the scoundrels without a scorecard. That’s the Mitchell Report, and an incomplete one at that.