When it came time to announce the results of the two-year investigation of steroids in Major League Baseball, it was no surprise that the three parties involved—former Senator George Mitchell, league commissioner Bud Selig, and players association head Don Fehr—insisted on holding separate press conferences in separate venues. Considering it practically took an act of Congress for there even to be an investigation, why would the three sides cooperate with each other now? And so it was, three different press conferences, at three different hotels. Let the three-ring circus that is Major League Baseball begin.

First stop, the New York Grand Hyatt Hotel. I knew I was in the right place when I spotted Jose Canseco lurking around the lobby. Jose, after his 2005 tell-all “Juiced” was published, has been all too willing to talk about how he and others—lots of others—injected themselves and each other with steroids. Today, Jose wasn’t commenting. But he was available to have his picture taken. Say cheese!

Inside the spacious Grand Hyatt ballroom, and it would seem more spacious as the day went on, a few hundred reporters sat eagerly waiting to get their hands on the report 21 months in the making. And then it came, all 311 pages of it. As aides passed out copies, the room hushed as we all rifled through its pages, searching the legalese for the only thing we really wanted—names. And as we found them, the whispers rose above the crowd. “Clemens! Pettitte! Tejada! Miadich!… wait, who? Bart Miadich, a middling minor leaguer who spent portions of two seasons pitching for the Anaheim Angels before fizzling out in Japan in 2006, and who suffered some serious “roid rage” according to the report, was one of a number of players fingered as dopers by former Mets batboy turned pusher-man Kirk Radomski. In fact, if Radomski hadn’t agreed to cooperate with Mitchell, which he did as part of a plea agreement he struck when federal prosecutors busted him on steroid distribution charges earlier this year, it’s not sure how much thunder Mitchell would have brought to the table today.

After a lengthy summary of the report, in which he compared investigating Major League Baseball with brokering a peace deal in Northern Ireland, Mitchell dropped a bombshell: Do not discipline players, he said. It will only cost more money and bring more pain to baseball. “All efforts need to look to the future,” said Mitchell.  Oookay, but speaking of the future, the children, doesn’t refusing to punish these players send the wrong message to the kids who cheer for them? “We’re all human,” Mitchell answered, before waxing political about responsibility, accountability and deterrence. Then through a barrage of questions, Mitchell refused to drift even the slightest beyond his mandate of investigating steroids. Should this affect Hall of Fame balloting? How much did it cost? Is this a particular indictment of Barry Bonds? No comment. But, asked whether the players union was cooperative, Mitchell did finally concede, it has not been. Blast, too bad they’re not here to comment.

We’d have to wait until 6 PM to get their take on the whole they stonewalled us thing. In the meantime, it was off to the Waldorf Astoria for the swanky MLB presser. Six blocks up Park Ave in a gale of freezing rain, we all gathered in the 18^th floor Palm Room of the Waldorf, where, MLB Commissioner Bud Selig, looking as frumpy and squinty as ever in the bright lights and flashes of the cameras, pronounced boldly, almost defiantly, “This is a call to action and I will act!” Selig announced that he embraced all 20 of Mitchell’s recommendations, and practically patted himself on the back in describing how proactive baseball has been in ridding itself of steroids. Use “appears” to have declined, Selig trumpeted. Teams are no longer given 24-hour notice prior to one of its players being given a random drug test. Human Growth hormones have been banned, though there’s still no way to test for it. The league has even partnered with the Partnership for a Drug Free America. “But!” Selig insisted, finger raised in the air, “fans deserve a level playing field, and Major League Baseball remains committed.”

So, will he investigate players? Punishment will be determined and doled out on a case-by-case basis, said Selig. Does that include striking stats from the record books? Or perhaps noting them with an asterisk? “Case by case,” Selig reminded us. “I have a lot of work to do,” he said. And how much does he consider himself at fault for this whole mess? “It happened. As I said before, this document should serve as a road map and if it serves that purpose…” Yeah, apparently not at all. Oh and also, despite the MLB having had the document for three days, Selig hadn’t finished reading it yet, which, conveniently, gave him the ability not to comment on many of its specifics or its scope or even what he intended to do about it, other than to reiterate that somehow, someway, at some point, he would act.

Right, moving on. For act three we jaunted just down the block to the Intercontinental Hotel, and its 3rd floor Madison Room, which, though ornate and wood-paneled, was about a tenth of the size of the Grand Hyatt ballroom. Aha, and now we saw their plan: march us around in the freezing rain and cram us into progressively smaller rooms, they’re trying to wear us out. And it was working. By 6 PM Donald Fehr, executive director of the MLB players association, entered and gave a terse, unapologetic, at times combative press conference. Though first asserting how cooperative the players association has been, he did concede that “perhaps” steps could have been taken sooner. However, with Selig acting unilaterally as he did in announcing the investigation two years ago, the players association was essentially left with no choice but to represent the players as it felt it should, which essentially meant they told them to stonewall the investigation. Not that Fehr said it so bluntly. He urged players to find other lawyers to advise them, given the ongoing criminal investigations. Throughout, Fehr refused to speculate on any number of fronts, because he too hadn’t read the report either. Though Fehr perhaps had a better excuse. Mitchell’s investigative team he ran out of his law firm DLA Piper, hadn’t sent the players association a copy of the report until 1pm that afternoon, and it was just one hard copy at that. “We had to make all the copies ourselves,” said MLBPA communications director Greg Bouris.  So it seemed, that Mitchell, tired after two years of being denied access to players and lacking the power to subpoena them, was determined to stick it to the players association by sending them one hard copy of his 300 page report. And so with each of the three parties touting their own compliance and lack of fault, the day ended and we walked, tired and cold, once again into the freezing rain.

Major League Baseball has had no claim to the sacred for a very long time—certainly not after many of its big-name players began falling out of the pharmaceutical closet. And this year it truly descended to the profane when Barry Bonds, just months ahead of his federal indictment for lying to a grand jury about his use of performance-enhancing drugs, broke the game's most hallowed record as its all-time home run king.

So perhaps nobody should have been surprised—certainly not after some of the rare confessors, like Jose Canseco and the late Ken Caminiti, described steroid use in baseball as epidemic—by anything former senator George Mitchell revealed today as a result of his investigation into drug use in the game. Still, there had to be gasps throughout the nation as the greatest pitcher of the modern era, Roger Clemens, was fingered as a drug cheat right alongside Bonds. For his part, Clemens is denying everything. Late in the day Clemens's lawyer, Rusty Hardin, issued a statement calling the inclusion of his client's name "very unfair." Hardin said, "He is left with no meaningful way to combat what he strongly contends are totally false allegations. He has not been charged with anything, he will not be charged with anything, and yet he is being tried in the court of public opinion with no recourse."

Nobody, certainly not Mitchell, was pretending that the list of some six dozen names was comprehensive. Most of those named appear to be players unlucky enough to have procured steroids from one of two men: Kirk Radomski, a former New York Mets clubhouse assistant who cooperated as part of a federal plea agreement, and Brian McNamee, Clemens's former personal trainer who became a New York Yankees strength and conditioning coach. And the report owes a clear debt to "Game of Shadows," the book about Bonds's ties to the BALCO drug lab. Still, after a 21-month chase, with virtually no players cooperating with him and no special investigatory powers, Mitchell did name names that reflected a broad cross-section of the game, from a potential Hall of Famer to marginal big-leaguers, from bulked-up sluggers to scrawny infielders, and pitchers of all stripes—not just pin-.

The list included current big-name players—Andy Pettitte, Miguel Tejada, Eric Gagne, Paul Lo Duca, Gary Sheffield, and Brian Roberts—as well as former stars—Kevin Brown, Chuck Knoblauch, Lenny Dykstra, David Justice, Mo Vaughn, Matt Williams and Benito Santiago. (See a gallery of some of the biggest names among current players in the report). Except for Clemens, none of the players named in the report had immediate comment. Mitchell insisted that he didn't simply rely on the testimony of cooperating witnesses, but that he had corroborating evidence. Still, some of it, at least as produced in the report, seems rather sketchy, vague and possibly inconclusive.
 

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