Letters to the Editor
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I don't think this is the story here
What you say about race and who is being harried for steroid use is probably true. Unfortunately, I concluded long ago that fairness and balance were qualities that were vanishing in American discourse. Everything has to be black or white. Shades of gray have no place in this world and are to be ignored.
The real story is the report itself. First is it's existence at all and second is what the report itself is.
Steroids are bad. Weeeell, yes they are. If used outside of medical controls, these substances, which the body produces itself naturally, can and will do bad things to you. So far, it sounds like a player who chooses to use steroids is building long term physical trouble for themselves. Also, it sounds like a personal problem, not a national one.
But wait you say. These are performance enhancers. They will give the player an unfair advantage. Huh? What - you think that baseball is an athletic contest like the Olympics? First of all, baseball is entertainment. It is not an athletic contest like the Olympics.
In the Olympics you have individual athletes competing against each other to see who is the best on that particular day. In baseball you have a bunch of teams competing to see which team can make the most money for their owners.
In the Olympics, someone using performance enhancing drugs might well have an advantage over his competitors and the advantage would be unfair. Baseball is about teams. Many teams have had stand out players and yet not made it to the playoffs, much less the series (The Red Sox, one of my teams, has had stand out players for decades, Ted Williams and Carl Yastremski come to mind immediately as well as many others, but it wasn't until they played my other team, the St. Louis Cardinals, with a team that had no stand out players of the caliber of Williams or Yastremski, that they won (it was a horrible series for me)). Go figure.
So is steroid use in baseball cheating? Not in my opinion. Plus, leaving aside the personal price that a steroid using player will pay, I would argue that they're good for baseball. A performance enhanced player will be more entertaining for the fans, thus bringing more fans into the stadium, thus making more money for the owner. Everybody wins except for the poor bastard that thinks he needs to use steroids. If you want to ban steroids in baseball, do it on humanitarian grounds, not on fairness grounds.
The other story is that the Mitchell report demonstrates that the legacy of that scumbag senator from Wisconsin, Joe McCarthy, is alive and well today. Using McCarthy's playbook - shadowy informants who have an axe to grind, ignoring virtually every rule of evidence, and violating virtually every judicial norm - Mr. Mitchell has smeared any number of players. Great. That's just the sort of thing I want to see us doing. The only good thing to come out of this (sortta) is that Bud Selig is going to punish those players identified in the report. Wonderful! Let the lawsuits begin! This oughta be great theater because, other than the fact that some baseball players use steroids, the Mitchell report doesn't prove a goddamn thing.