Steroid.com PART 1 DECEMBER 14, 2007 Yesterday at 2pm EST, the entire country was treated to a report on performance enhancing drugs in Major League Baseball – called the Mitchell Report. While that report was being released to the public via a press conference, we here at Steroid.com were downloading the full 400-page version – and printing it out. Roughly 13.3 seconds into the release of the full Mitchell report, virtually every major news organization had published full dissertations about it on their websites. At this point, I’m reasonably sure that a team of speed-readers are employed at every major news outlet. I’m a quick reader, but not that quick. Over the next few days (and likely weeks) I’m going to be dissecting the entire Mitchell Report. I’ve finished reading it once (yes, all 400 pages), and I’m currently reading it again. My initial impression is that it was written with the best of intentions, and the over-riding message that it presented was to move forward in a positive manner with regards to the steroid situation in professional baseball. The secondary message was that the intent of the report was not to play a game of “gotcha” with professional athletes names…even though many of those names were released in the report as being associated with anabolic steroid (or Growth Hormone) use. By and large, the mainstream media as well as minor affiliates focused primarily on the names of the athletes, and painting them with the “cheater” title as quickly as possible. I can only imagine that sportswriters around the country have been wearing the asterisk key out, attaching them to names from the Mitchell Report. Again, this (of course) was against the clear intent of the report. In fact, the report actually says several times that this is not the intent. Looking at the past (and at people suspected of cheating) is the only way we can really look towards the future. And clearly, this report (as it reminds us) is not just meant to point the finger at certain athletes. It is to shine a new light on the future So we’re told, anyway. But honestly…would anyone care if the report didn’t name a bunch of athletes? Would CNN have given us live coverage? Would ESPN have had their writers read a 400-page report at a rate of a page per .000654ths/second? Would I be asking all of these rhetorical questions? And then answering them? Of course not. So over the next few editions of my daily Injected series here on Steroid.com, I’ll be sharing the highlights of the Mitchell Report with you…and probably focusing on some things that the major news outlets (and anyone unwilling to spend 8 hours reading) will likely miss out on. Steroid.com is committed to presenting a dissenting voice in this matter, and even if it stands as the lone dissenting voice – we will present it.
