Right. It couldn't be because he just had surgery and won't be able to, you know, pitch until August 2008. That certainly wouldn't be the reason. There are enough guilty parties to this whole ordeal without manufacturing new ones that make no sense. Not to mention the bigger consideration: George Mitchell is an attorney. The investigators on his staff are attorneys. DLA Piper is a law firm. A breach of ethics like that is grounds for disbarment in any jurisdiction.
I caught that. Makes me scratch my head over why Theo would then trade prospects and cash for the guy at the deadline. I was also wondering to myself whether the Brewers would now have sufficient cause to void their contract with Gagne. The Red Sox get an first round draft pick with that signing. They must have been sweating out the hours, hoping that Gagne wouldn't sign his tender.
That should also address some of the concerns about the Red Sox skating in this report.....thats a pretty fair indictement of Epstein...
They talked about Gagne on ESPN radio last night. Basically said the the Sox knew Gagne and Donnely were both juicers but traded for them anyway. Everybody is taking it on the chin and Yankee fans seem to be overreacting to Mitchell. IMO the Sox knowing these guys were taking something and trading for them makes them look worse than the Yankees having guys they may or may not have known were juicing.
They're actually in the exact same boat as the Yankees... these two guys (Gagne and Donnelly) were still under the catagory of "former roiders" when Boston traded for them according to Mitchell. The Yankees and Red Sox were both completely unaware if any of their players were juiced up in 2000, which is the time in question.
The only way to level the playing field is to legalize drugs. I don't see what the big deal is. All this report really proves is what everyone knew all along, drugs work. As a hypothetical, knowing steriods improve performance and that they were legal as far as MLB was concerned or if not legal at least they were approved through the nod and wink of the Commissioners and the Union office, would you want the GM of the team you root for signing guys who are suspected users who were a little long in the tooth or signing guys that were a little long in the tooth but were thought of as clean? Feel free to lie in your response.
So you don't care that ballplayers will be dying in their fifties from heart failure, strokes, and liver cancer (all of which are proven potential steroid side-effects)?
Just like they didn't leak Byrd's name just prior to game 7 of the ALCS, right? Obviously, they felt it necessary to say they weren't tipped off so it's pretty evident that a lot of people thought they were. There are a lot of people who worked in that investigation that I am sure were not lawyers and could have cared less who they told what to.
Whats interesting is that Bud Selig was brilliant in selecting the Honorable former Senate majority leader Mitchell to chair the commission report. If the union ignores or stonewalls MLB, Congress will come down like a ton of bricks on the players union and mandate by law most if not all of the recommendations. Fehr is a smart guy. Thats why he was talking like he got kicked in the balls at his press conference.
They would do that anyway. They almost did it 2 years ago when Cain was chairing the commission. What they really need to do is mandate some rules for the NFL where they care a lot more about pot smoking then they do about steroids or HGH. There should be one standard and one set of penalties for all sports and it should be based on what the IOC does. Put that in place and see how fast things get cleaned up.
Because Olympic athletes are clean? Sorry, the only way to fix things is to educate players at all levels, from pee-wee leagues on up to the pros, in every sport, about the true dangers of drug use. As long as testing is the method of prevention, the problem will continue. Why? Because as long as there is a test, there will be a way to cheat around it. I mean, we do all realize that these guys are cheaters against their entire sport, right? What motivation is there not to cheat in everything? Now if they truly understand that a shrunken pair of boys, and a massive heart attack are in their future, maybe that is worth taking note of.
Yes, of course. That MUST have been the Mitchell committee leaking that to the Chronicle. Not that, if it were Mitchell, the bigger story of the day would have been how the Red Sox were trying to get an unfair advantage over a mediocre pitcher, and how a statesman/attorney committed a disbarable offense. And you haven't address the unaddressable point about why the Red Sox would conceivably sign a player journeyman middle reliever who won't be able to throw a ball in anger until next August. Clearly it was insider information that made the Red Sox shy away from such an attractive resigning.
The continual sacrifice of personal freedom, dignity and honor by subjecting more and more people to drug testing just to be able to work seems a steep price to pay when the league and public has encouraged players to take drugs in order to have unlimited fame and fortune. This country has wasted billions on the war on drugs and we have sacrificed the freedom and creative ability of thousands of people fighting a lossing war on drugs. This is just another fools battle. Players who want to live long productive lives will sacrifice money and fame for it, those who want to burn bright as long as they can will pay the consequences. Until the incentive of fame and fortune is reduced and the consequences outweigh the benifit this will continue to be an escalating war between science on both sides of the ledger. The geni is out of the bottle and there is no putting it back in. Hopefully the public will stop supporting the games and the money will dry up the franchises will shut their doors and the fame and fortune will also dry up which will take away the incentive for every expanding franchises, wealth and greed.
Not at all. I said it myself - Mitchell wasn't the right choice for this job. Doesn't mean I don't think the idea of him cluing the Red Sox into his report so that they could cut a broken, mediocre, middle-reliever, is silly.
Although I am now pretty sure that all of the players who are on the list took roids, the way he went about this was pretty disgusting in my opinion
OK, enough is enough. There was no conspiracy. Epstein took a beating the report, as did some '07 Red Sox and Mo Vaughn, one of the most popular Red Sox of the 1990s. Mitchell was dealt a bad hand to begin with, and he did the best he could with it. He was a bad choice for the job, but that's not his fault. Based on the report, there's no reason to doubt his character and integrity, and, more importantly, there has been nothing about Mitchell's personal history that is at all suspect; he seems like a good guy. No more excuses; those who were caught were caught. End of story.
