Letters to the Editor
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For the Ireland reference alone, George Mitchell can get bent with the lot of 'em
Just for the "Remember when I sat around a table in Northern Ireland with a bunch of other folks and they decided maybe it was in a shared interest to stop killing each other?" reminder in the report. How pathetic.
Really. When baseball owners actually begin firebombing the offices of the Players Union, I guess then it will be an apt analogy. (Although not to put too fine a point on it I think Ireland's worst day was better than Iraq's best.)
George Mitchell ain't done shit since he left the Senate, and it's debatable whether he accomplished much there apart from posing as the classic "Statesman" (read: "moderate" Dem who lets the Republicans get everything they want, but who might occasionally offer a speech on the floor otherwise). So he eschews the Senate because he really really liked baseball more, and really, what is more important in life than being a third tier cog in mgmt side in baseball? But he didn't get the Commish job he so coveted. Could he have been better than Selig? Of course, but as King notes that ain't exactly saying much. So they trot him out for this escapade because this one-time-reportedly-noble-man narrative offered up to the press would be especially useful for mgmt's latest "what? what WHAT? there were steroids?" trope.
So ignore the conflicts, ignore the most important point -- as KK notes, it wouldn't (OK, in this day and age SHOULDN'T) get past an editor or judge -- and rush to the barricades, oh ye of Sports Illustrated and ESPN acolytes! Shocked, SHOCKED you are to hear of Mr. Clemens!...yadda yadda steaming piles of bullshit. Mr. Mitchell: if you didn't want the report to reduce to a "Clemens was on the juice! Nya nya!" or "Really? No major Red Sox?", you should've worked with, and not with ownership against, labor. Which brings me right back to where I was before I tried slogging through this beast report, which is undergrad-level but undoubtedly paid tens of thousand law firm hours to create:
Baseball: Screw Everyone Involved. Wake me when its relevant again.
And is it possible that a King Kaufman reader preceding me actually trotted out the "Won't somebody think of the children?" line? Holy cow. Fuck your children. If you can't raise them to know the difference between "Hey, David Segui just hit the ball, sweet" and "maybe David Segui just put a needle between his toes to get that hit, and I should too" then up yours. Where might all these "kids" on the juice get the cash to procure it?