AT 2 o’clock this afternoon, the names will come pouring off the pages of the Mitchell Report. They will flood the Grand Hyatt Hotel and spill into the streets of midtown, maybe gush all the way to the Waldorf, where Bud Selig will be waiting to tell us what all of this means to him. And for him.
That is the loudest buzz humming around this report after all: the names. What names are in there? Famous names? Obscure names? Familiar names? Forgotten names? How many names? Fifty? Sixty? Seventy? More?
It will be a pharmaceutical who’s-who list, a roster of shame and shams, of infamy and ignominy, a future card in a future edition of Trivial Pursuit. We will cluck at some names, gasp at others, probably shrug at most.
Mets fans will hold their breath most of the morning because much of the information in the report comes from a guy who used to work the clubhouses at Shea Stadium. Red Sox fans will, too, because if there aren’t at least a few of those names in here, the credibility of the man charged with compiling the list instantly will be called into question.
Names. Names. Names. Names.
For the caustic and the curious, for the skeptics and the cynics, it will be an overstuffed buffet table of names, dinner time at the Ponderosa. And that is the gravest danger of all facing Major League Baseball. Selig cannot be satisfied throwing these raw pieces of meat to the wolves, expecting this will serve as a harsh public penance for his sport.
Because if he does, he will take what has already been a regrettable chapter in his game’s history and transform it instead into a potentially lethal one. Because if baseball has instituted more safeguards now than ever before, if it has written punitive consequences into its basic statutes, there is still one thing it has yet to legislate. And that’s the most troubling problem of all:
Why did these players start taking the juice in the first place?
The answer is a simple one: because it pays. Because it was smart for personal business, if not for personal well-being. Because if you ask any 22-year-old athlete if they’ll sacrifice minor physical ailments short-term and maybe five years off the back ends of their lives in exchange for the riches of big-league life, what do you think they’ll say?
Hell, what would you say?
We can wring our hands until the skin comes off. We can tsk-tsk-tsk the likes of Mark McGwire and Jason Giambi and Sammy Sosa and Barry Bonds, the most prominent men whose names will this afternoon be joined by dozens of their contemporaries. We can plant our flag on the moral high ground. But the question remains:
If you could turn yourself from a career minor leaguer into a serviceable six-year major leaguer by poking your thigh with a needle, would you do it? If you could turn yourself from a serviceable player into a $10 million-a-year player, or from a $10 million-a-year player into a $20 million-a-year player, would you close your eyes and see what the clear, the cream, or any other manner of powder, liquid or aspirant can do for your biceps, triceps, lats and abs?
You wouldn’t? Really?
Then that puts you in a distinct minority, and good to you on that lonely island. These are the choices the men on Mitchell’s list had to make, and they are choices that 18- and 20- and 22-year olds have to make still. You don’t think that right now a mad scientist is at work inventing an undetectable drug? You don’t think the science will always be a half-step ahead of detectors? You’re kidding yourself.
Baseball, as it sits, has done a wonderful job of figuring out punishment. It has done less of a job ensuring prevention. That wasn’t the mission of the Mitchell Report, but it should be the immediate task of Selig and his enforcers from this day forward. Otherwise, all Mitchell has done is spend 20 months and $20 million on an interesting trivia question.
And planted the inevitable seeds for another one five, 10, 15 years from now.