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Roid rage

By Phil Barron ⋅ December 14, 2007 ⋅ ⋅ ⋅ Post a comment

For me, the most interesting aspect of Mitchell Day was the overblown “team coverage” given the story by local NBC affiliate KSDK. This is what happens when a station tries to take ownership of a story. Similarly hysterical is the war font treatment employed by the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.

Why, it’s the biggest story since the invasion of Iraq, or so you’d believe. (Great image juxtaposition of Mitchell and Selig, though.) Pretty shrill for a report that is rather underwhelming in depth and in scope.

After spending all day yesterday on the topic, Will Leitch of Deadspin provides the appropriately jaded viewpoint:

This is what MLB paid $20 million for? This took nearly two years? Essentially, Sen. Mitchell has two sources, a bunch of media reports, Jose Canseco’s book and every player in baseball (save two) ignoring his requests to talk. The only reason Roger Clemens and Andy Pettitte are in here is because they were unfortunate enough to have acquaintances who had no choice but to talk. The report has brought us no closer, because nothing possibly could. We don’t think this is going to bring us any closure, because the report is so obviously not comprehensive.

Everyone wants us to move on. That’s fine with us; we’ve been wanting to do that for a while anyway. But the people in this document are guilty scapegoats; they’re the unlucky folks who got caught. (Kind of.) Is that enough to discontinue suspicion of everyone? They hope so. We highly doubt it.

Yawn, indeed. You should be neither shocked, nor awed, nor impressed by coming claims that we have entered the “post-war steroid era.”

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