The reaction to the Mitchell Report on steroids in baseball proves only one point, but it proves that one point beyond question: We haven't learned a damn thing. And by we I mean me and you. Baseball players. Fans. Media. All of us.
We. Haven't learned. A damn thing.
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| Following Roger Clemens' children? That is simply a disgusting move by reporters. (US Presswire) |
The worst of the worst fallout from the Mitchell Report has been the media's insistence that players answer these charges, and answer them now. Roger Clemens and Andy Pettitte and Eric Gagne and scores of other players have just been labeled cheaters. Everything they've worked for, legitimately or otherwise, has been rocked by a report that took almost two years to compile. So here come we in the media, wanting answers -- and we want them right now.
We suck. We really do.
And nowhere do we suck harder than in Texas, where media members are staking out an elementary school. No wonder the general public sentiment on the media wavers somewhere between distrust and disgust. When baseball writers are flying from New York to Piney Point Village, Texas, to stand outside St. Francis' Episcopal Day School and scream accusatory questions at 11-year-old Kody Clemens' father ... we've become paparazzi. We've become predators.
The thing is, this was never our hunt in the first place. Oh, we tried to make it so. After looking the other way for an entire decade -- Ben Johnson got caught using steroids at the 1988 Olympics, remember -- baseball writers as a whole finally began catching on after a single sports writer from the Associated Press noticed a bottle of something called Androstenedione in Mark McGwire's locker in 1998.
By then McGwire looked like Brutus from those old Popeye cartoons, a huge pair of shoulders and enormous chest riding impossibly above a tiny waist. We didn't see what was happening for much of the 1990s because we didn't want to see. And since we didn't want to see, baseball didn't care to look. And if baseball wasn't going to look, hell, the players were going to get what they could get. Home runs equaled salary, and salary was taking off. So players cheated. If I'd have been a professional ballplayer in that environment, I'd have cheated, too.
Since the discovery of that bottle of Andro, everyone has been out for their pound of flesh. Lawmakers in Washington D.C. have posed for cameras. Federal cops have sought headlines. Sports writers have flexed their keyboard muscles. One segment of fans has used the steroid issue to legitimize their nasty feelings about athlete arrogance, Barry Bonds first and foremost, while another segment has used this issue to show just how far they're willing to look the other way to support their heroes.
The whole thing had become a tiresome joke long before the Mitchell Report came out last week. The punch line hit me in the face in August when I was dispatched to the West Coast to follow Bonds during his final pursuit of Hank Aaron's career home run record. Everywhere we went, Bonds generally refused to speak to the media and most media members refused right back, standing within earshot of the man, staring at him as if he were an exotic zoo exhibit, but too scared to ask him a question. Whatever were Bonds' thoughts of us as a group before that episode, they surely were lowered by that whole ordeal. We're tough on a laptop, but put us in the same room with one of our targets and we wilt. It was embarrassing.
Outside the clubhouse, the home crowd cheered for Bonds as if he were Jesus. In Los Angeles and San Diego he was treated more like Judas, but here's the thing: Those stadiums were full. Fans wanted to be there, to see history. That underscored the most basic lesson from the Steroid Era: Fans don't care. They really don't. They're still coming to the ballpark.
And they'll come after the Mitchell Report, even as some of the players listed have flailed for the silliest possible explanations. Brian Roberts admitted to using steroids one time, but only once. Andy Pettitte said he used HGH twice, but only twice. Someone soon will claim to have cheated three times, but only three. (Roger Clemens has already called dibs on zero.) Some fans will buy it. Some won't. The media will spend hours breaking down these guys' confessional statements, parsing words, as if words matter.
They don't matter. None of this crap matters. That's what all of us should have learned from these past few years: Athletes use drugs, and some of them will be caught, and at the end of the day none of it matters. Fans don't care. Teams like the Los Angeles Dodgers, who signed crappy backup catcher Gary Bennett this week despite his career .242 average and his inclusion in the Mitchell Report, don't care. And as soon as the next Victor Conte comes out with promises of the next undetectable steroid, the players won't care either. They'll go right back to cheating.
And we'll go back to speculating.
And Bud Selig will go back to investigating.
And some sports editor somewhere will order one of his reporters to go to some kid's elementary school or piano recital or youth soccer game. Because that kid's father might have cheated, and the story must be pursued.
Even if no one cares anymore to read it.
