Okay, I've had nearly a day to digest the Mitchell Report and while it's a great start, I have some problems with it.
First, it seems like all of the names are based on three areas: Mets/Yankees, A's/Giants, and the Orioles. What about the other 25 teams in baseball? I know Sen. Mitchell said that the report included players from all 30 teams, but that only meant that at some point in their careers they played for those teams.
This report gives just 85 names, past and present, in a league that regularly employs 1,200 players after the rosters expand each September. This means all that was accomplished here was the dragging of 85 players into the court of public opinion, while allowing the majority of 20 years of steroid use to be forgotten or swept under the rug because it wasn't included in this report.
I'm just speculating without any proof, but where are the guys from the Cleveland Indians in the mid-1990s, or the Colorado Rockies from the late 90s, or even the rest of the Phillies from the 1993 team. The report only named Lenny Dykstra because of his connection to the Mets, but didn't delve deeper into the problem and see if the steroid use extended throughout the Phillies clubhouse upon his arrival in Philadelphia. Can this report really absolve guys like Albert Belle, Darren Daulton, or Bret Boone from any wrongdoing?
Take a look at Bret Boone's statistics. He was a nobody through 2000, then at 32 years old, he magically becomes an MVP caliber player for three years, has an average year in 2004 and then is never heard from again. Doesn't that seem a little odd?
That's just one of the hundreds of examples of fishy performance growth that the Mitchell Report didn't uncover because of the limited range of the investigation.