E&P piece criticizing 1990s baseball writers for not breaking 'roids stories

As I mentioned earlier, reporters brought this on themselves by issuing mea culpas in the first place. NOBODY (except maybe Boom) was accusing the media of missing the story for the very reasons everyone on here seems to be stating. But the mea culpas were the price that had to be paid so that reporters wouldn't sound like hypocrites when they attacked Selig et al for "ignoring" the issue.

 

As I've mentioned when this topic has come up before, I asked several prominent players on teams I covered about steroids in the late 90s and early 2000's. They all said they'd never seen any, never taken them, didn't know any who had.

Two of those guys wound up being named in the BALCO case. One of them had told me in no uncertain terms that he was upset with players who did use steroids because "they're taking short cuts and I'm spending all day the gym.'' I actually believed him, he seemed so indignant about it.

So people were asking questions. But the answers weren't always truthful. People lied. There's not much you can do when that happens, without any physical evidence. Doesn't mean all baseball writers were asleep at the switch. If I'd been able to force people to tell the truth, I would have. I did try, and I'm sure many others did, too.

 

He's a tool. A couple of years ago he wrote some flippant lede about how almost all sports writers are jock-sniffers and star-struck jock wannabes. It wasn't thought-through at all. It was used to introduce a glowing piece on his one shining exception - Rick Reilly. You could tell by the way he wrote it that it was just kind of ingrained in his thinking: Sports writer = Toy department jock groupie.

Tool.

 

Perhaps it's just obvious to everyone, but no one is mentioning it. Much of what Mitchell has in his report -- the stuff on Clemens and Pettitte, the stuff on Brian Roberts -- could never make it into a newspaper. There's not enough evidence to satisfy a newspaper's lawyers. The BALCO reporting had documents and multiple sources for everything it stipulated. So even if reporters had $20 million to spend, legions of trained investigators who could spend thousands of billable hours and a couple of knuckleheads with sentencing recommendations over their heads, they still might not have had enough to go to press.

 

This is a very good point. Most of the evidence wasn't enough to put in a newspaper and it isn't enough (in most cases) to even bring disciplinary action.

Much like Balco, however, when the investigators/feds determined that they didn't have enough, the next best thing became making public as much of the so-called evidence as possible.

Just a different type of punishment, unfortunately one without due process or any recourse.

 

I'd much rather a paper get Pulitzers for exposing corrupt politicians, dangerous products, child abuse, stuff like that. Fuck, let's have some perspective here.

 

Ragu's concept of being gone after by the Feds remains somewhat limited.

 

If the Feds come to a player and say, "Give up your supplier or we'll fuck up your life," the player has been "gone after" pretty effectively. Prosecution is not the only metric.

 

Actually, the correct formulation is "Don't do anything the Feds can construe as illegal.."