Dr. Robert

So what are we to make of the Mitchell Report on steroids and performance enhancement drugs(PED)?.

Not much I think.

The report affirms what we all believed which is that the use of PED was widespread and that baseball managers, general managers, owners, trainers, players, agents, players union and the commissioner's office were all aware of this fact and did nothing.

Why was nothing done? I'm not sure. Who was being hurt by the use of PED? Not the owners, general managers, managers or the players who were using PED. I think the only potential agents for fixing the problem were the commissioners office and the player's union. The primary victims were the clean players who were at a competitive disadvantage to the users.

The reasons for using PED were and are compelling. Take the example of a marginal catcher. If you play at AAA level you would make less than $100,000. The minimum salary for the major leagues is about $400,000. If a marginal catcher can sustain a career as a backup catcher the salary would grow to $400,000 - $700,000 a year. If a marginal catcher could land a starter's job even for a year or two the salary would probably exceed $1,000,000.

The difference is ability of a AAA-catcher and a backup catcher (e.g. OPS .630) and a marginal starting catcher (e.g. OPS .700) is indeed thin. But the difference is salary is enormous.

The same salary disparity combined with ability similarity exists for marginal relief pitchers.

So it was not too surprising to see that many of the players named in the Mitchell Report were marginal players. They had a lot to gain and little to lose by taking PED. And since there is no testing for HGH, I would suspect that there are many players in these categories still using HGH.

What should we think about the players named in the report?

Not much I think.

Mitchell had very few sources. There was a concentration of players named that were associated with the Mets trainer and Yankees conditioning coach. I suspect that other teams had as many players involved as the Mets and Yankees. My guess is that many of the players named were users but the evidence in the report was not corroborated by second sources. As my son pointed out, a newspaper, even the NY News or Post would not have printed these names based on only one source.

The one issue that remains open is how should serious baseball analysts evaluate the records of players in this era in general, and how should we evaluate the records or known PED users such as Bonds and McGwire? Note I leave Clemens off the list of "known users" for now.

That's a difficult question that I leave for another time.