Bud Selig wanted a whimp, not a truth-seeker--NY Times

"If Commissioner Bud Selig hired George J. Mitchell to get to the bottom of steroid use in baseball, which was what Congress told Selig he had to do, he got the wrong person....

• Was there no Midwestern Radomski or a Radomski clone on the West Coast? It would be naïve to think there wasn’t. If Mitchell did not have the Radomski roster, would the roughly 400-page report have been filled with blank pages?

Where was Mitchell’s original work? If law enforcement authorities had forced Radomski and McNamee to cooperate with Major League Baseball under a threat of imprisonment or stiffer prison sentences, as they did for Mitchell, the same information would have probably surfaced.

• What names did the Mitchell investigation develop on its own?..."

• (Chass references Pete Rose investigator John Dowd).

(NY Times): "I know John Dowd, and George J. Mitchell is no John Dowd.

• Aware of Dowd’s experience, Mitchell called him after getting the steroids assignment, but whatever Dowd told him didn’t seem to help much.

Selig would never have gone to Dowd because Dowd, a hard-nosed Washington lawyer, was Fay Vincent’s guy. Selig would not use Vincent’s guy.

• In fact, years ago Selig and his chief operating officer, Bob DuPuy, tried to have Dowd disbarred for talking publicly about the Rose investigation. They said baseball was Dowd’s client, and that he violated the client’s wishes not to talk about the case.

Mitchell, however, cites one development in his report that may be its most overlooked element. Mitchell mentions a June 7, 1991, memo Vincent wrote to clubs when he was commissioner in which he added steroids to baseball’s list of banned substances....

• The release of the report was a blow to baseball’s labor relations. Mitchell’s refusal to give the report to the union at the same time he gave it to the commissioner’s office was petty.

If he gave it to the commissioner’s office to have labor officials check it for violations of the labor agreement with the union, the union certainly should have received it early for the same reason. Club and union lawyers have disagreed for nearly 40 years on violations of their agreements.

• Mitchell apparently wouldn’t give it to the union because the union refused to cooperate with the investigation. Such juvenile behavior is beneath a man of Mitchell’s stature."....

From NY Times column by Murray Chass, "Mitchell Report Revealed Little Original Work," 12/18/07.

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