Let the Witch Hunt Begin

Ready for the Mitchell Report? Totally psyched? Man, it’s just like the World Series, only with allegations of drug use instead of baseball games. I can’t believe it’s almost here, just in time for [insert winter holiday of choice].

Howard Bryant at ESPN writes a detailed piece outlining the troublesome nature of this investigation (hat tip to Baseball Musings). You really need to read the entire article, but here are a few little nuggets worth mentioning:

The teams’ general managers, too, felt pressured by questions that led them to believe the Mitchell report will judge them harshly for condoning widespread drug use by not bringing it to the attention of club owners and baseball’s central office. That, they acquiesced, is an unfortunate but real byproduct of the enormous demands placed on player evaluators to win games in a billion-dollar business.

“If this thing comes out and pins everything on us, which is what I think will happen, then every GM in baseball should sue baseball,” one general manager said over the summer. “It’s not going to happen, but this report is going to be total B.S. It’s going to blame us for everything, because we don’t have anyone in our corner. The owners aren’t going to blame themselves, are they?”

And further down:

As ESPN.com spoke with baseball people interviewed during the investigation, a common theme emerged: Investigators, while generally cordial, often revealed an alarming lack of knowledge regarding the day-to-day workings of baseball. Instead of focusing on the elements of the game that might make drug use appealing, investigators asked surface-level questions such as which players suffer from back acne and who underwent the most dramatic body changes. One interviewer, for example, read off a list of players and asked the interviewee to say if he believed the player could have used steroids. No questions were asked, the source said, about the root causes of steroid use.

“They didn’t ask us those things because they didn’t have the level of sophistication about what we do,” said a National League strength coach. “They didn’t know the right questions to ask. At no point in my interview did anyone say to me, ‘What can we recommend to make sure this never happens again?’”

Sounds like the emphasis is more on assigning blame than actually trying to solve the problem. Disappointing, perhaps, but hardly surprising.

Let he who cast very small rocks…