Ever since former Maine Democratic Senator George Mitchell’s report on the state of steroid abuse in Major League Baseball came out, the sports world has been enthralled. And although we’ve found the report is really nothing more than one man’s testimony—-a former New York Mets clubhouse attendant named Kirk Radomski—not to mention full of flimsy, anecdotal and circumstantial evidence, it’s clear Major League Baseball is going to use this as a major tool to “shape up” the sport. With that in mind, Contributing Editor Alex Ferreyra decided to collect the evidence and find out for himself which teams are were hit worst by the report and which are gonna be ripe to pick on with “Ster-rrrrrods!” chants this upcoming season.

I don’t know why reading the Mitchell Report didn’t shock me. It might be the fact that I never thought Major League Baseball (or any sport, really) was clean to begin with. I consider myself a pretty competitive guy, and I know I’ve done some pretty juvenile things to win (don’t ask). So knowing how ultra-aggressive ball players are, the fact that some have used “Performance Enhancing Drugs” or PEDs, to hit a ball a few feet further or pitch 10 MPH faster doesn’t disappoint me as a fan. I’m not one of the guys who thinks baseball needs to retain the “purity” it had before they let black people play. Silly me, I prefer the 600-foot home runs being hit by a rainbow coalition of roided up monsters than an exclusionary force of WASPs hitting bloop singles.

But that’s another topic.

What we’re here to discuss is which teams came out the worst in Mitchell’s report to MLB. How did I come down to these teams? Well, three factors came into play:

• The number of current or former players represented from a team. So people like pitcher Kevin Brown, who’s part of the report and played for six teams, infected each of them along the way.
• The success and failure of the team during the period covered by the report, known as the “steroid era,” roughly between 1993-2005.
• Specifics that caught my eyes reading the 401-page meme. See: Paul Lo Duca.

Let’s start with the biggest losers: The Yankees. The report makes it clear that this goes past Brian McNamee, a former Yankees assistant trainer and selling associate of Radomski, telling the world that Roger Clemens stuck needles in his ass. The Bombers come out the worst because of the 20 current or former Yankees on the list, eleven of them played during their four-championship run of 1996-2000. And while their star of the era, Derek Jeter, was not in the report, it kind of puts a damper on those four championship banners in comparison to the other 22 the team owns and likes to boast about everywhere.

It also puts an awkward albatross around the necks of people connected to those late-90s titles. Rudy Guiliani practically lived at Yankee Stadium during his mayoral term and is a walking advertisement for Yankee lore (even if he did say he’d root for the rival Red Sox during this past World Series). Now when he dons his ubiquitous NY cap on the Presidential campaign trail, does that suggest he’s siding with cheaters? The Bomber’s then-coach Joe Torre has his legacy tied into those four rings. His new gig as the Dodgers skipper wouldn’t have been handed to him on a $13 million silver platter had he not won all those titles. Remember, this is a man who previously led the Braves, Cardinals and Mets to a combined 894-1003 record over twelve seasons. Not exactly the stuff of champions.

Next, the Baltimore Orioles follow the Yankees in this shame trail because they had almost as many players mentioned on the report as the Yankees—19—but with nowhere near the success. They snatched the AL East from the Yankees in 1997, but that is under the cloud of suspicion because of players like All Star first baseman Rafael Palmeiro (seen above, waiving his finger at congress saying he didn’t take steroids; and who, according to The New York Times, was eventually busted pre-Mitchell Report for using “a serious steroid, stanozolol”). Since that year, which is at the peak of the steroids era, they have never finished less than 13.5 games behind first place, commonly finishing somewhere between 27 and 35 games back. Damn, that is some incompetence, having one of the most juiced locker rooms in America and always finishing a double-digit behind the Yankees or Red Sox.

The Dodgers are next up and are the complete opposite of the Orioles. Instead of feeling a sense of pity for their ineptitude, the Dodgers’ 16 players are easiest to make fun of because they include Paul Lo Duca, easily the biggest moron of all the players listed in the Mitchell Report. Not only did he write multiple checks to Radomski, but he also wrote personalized notes. To the guy who was selling him steroids. Jesus, he apparently took too many fastballs off the head playing catcher. One of these was for a bounced check…

Sorry! But for some reason they sent the check back to me. I haven’t been able to call you back because my phone is TOAST! I have a new # it is [Lo Duca’s phone number is listed here]. Please leave your # again because I lost all of my phonebook with the other phone.

… and the other was written on Dodger stationary with the inscription,

“Thanks. Call me if you need anything, Paul.”

Yeah, I’m pretty sure he knew where to get the stupid pills. And if that wasn’t bad enough, Lo Duca connected the other big-name Dodgers on the list—$105 million bust Kevin Brown and Eric Gagne—to Radomski.

Speaking of Gagne, his inclusion on the list is being underreported by everyone. While people talk about stars like Clemens and Bonds, as they rightfully should, they forget that Gagne was the 2004 Cy Young winner who set a record by recording 84 straight saves during the time when he was supposedly using steroids. Lucky for him, he got his $10 million contract from the Milwaukee Brewers just before this hit.

Gagne segues into our last team, the Boston Red Sox. The Sox “only” had eleven players on the list, but it’s their management that is called out more than their players are in The Report. In it were e-mails between Red Sox executives (including supposed wunderkind GM Theo Epstein) pretty much saying that both Gagne and pitcher Brendan Donnelly were under suspicion of using PEDs. The Sox wound up signing both.



In a November 1, 2006 email to a Red Sox scout, general manager Theo Epstein asked, “Have you done any digging on Gagne? I know the Dodgers think he was a steroid guy. Maybe so. What do you hear on his medical?”

The scout, Mark Delpiano, responded, Some digging on Gagne and steroids IS the issue. Has had a checkered medical past throughout career including minor leagues. Lacks the poise and commitment to stay healthy, maintain body and re invent self. What made him a tenacious closer was the max effort plus stuff … Mentality without the plus weapons and without steroid help probably creates a large risk in bounce back durability and ability to throw average while allowing the change- up to play as it once did … Personally, durability (or lack of) will follow Gagne …

This is the biggest shocker to me of all. We all knew the players were juicing. But when the executives blatantly say “We’re going into a playoff push and we need relief pitchers, who cares if they’re using,” that’s what’s most disheartening. And it didn’t take much time for The Report to blow over with players on the list, like Tuesday’s signing of catcher Gary Bennett to the Dodgers, already in the teams’ good graces. As long as cash money is a team’s Raison d’être, cheating in whatever form won’t matter for owners. To them, winning teams are what hit TV shows are to networks—ways to print money. Like that wise sage Lo Duca once said:

“If you’re battling for a job, and the guy you’re battling with is using steroids, then maybe you say, ‘Hey, to compete, I need to use steroids because he’s using them… Don’t get me wrong. I don’t condone it. But it’s a very tough situation. It’s really all about survival for some guys.”

When the guy who was so oblivious to being caught is the clearest voice in the room, maybe it was time to break down the system and start over again.

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