From Mitchell Report older articles list

[TakebackOPACY]

The Mitchell Report has a list of articles from before August 1998 (McGwire Andro incident), the following is the excerpt related to steroids from one of those articles.

Dirty Little Secret

When will baseball pull its head out of the sand and start checking for steroids? It is raging completely out of control, and several players, general managers, managers and umpires tell me that more than 50 percent of the players in the game are using them.

Want to know why there were so many home runs this season? it's not that the pitching is so bad, but that the players are so juiced. Yet no one in baseball wants to check because they realize fewer home runs means less interest, and less interest means less profits.

Still, the ones being penalized are the players who refuse to use steroids. Guys like Fred McGriff and Barry Bonds could hit 20 more homers a year if they were on the juice, but they refuse. Instead, they watch players who are not close to their ability being compared to themselves simply because of the high steroid use.

Will someone please do something about it before it's too late?

Bob Nightengale, Bonds and Belle Will Cash in on Being Bad Boys,

Sporting News, Nov. 11, 1996.

[Baroquen131]

On a similar note... and I was looking for a thread that wasn't tied up in different Mitchell-related aspects of the situation.

Why aren't more people concerned about the # of players who were listed for using hGH? If you go back and look at the list of players mentioned in the report, 39 of the 88 men listed are linked to human growth hormone, and as we all know , this isn't detectable by current tests. (A blood test is said to be months off, but even if it was available it's not allowable under the CBA). That's not even counting the designer drugs and masking agents specifically used to "beat" the test, and also not taking into account the stories of advance notice of testing, and more immediate issues recounted such as lax administration of the testing, shredding of old negative results, and the lack of a truly independent testing authority.

I find it very naive that seemingly so many fans are willing to accept that PEDs are no longer an issue in baseball. Just because the punishments are now severe doesn't mean that the test isn't easy to beat. If players were so willing to gain an edge before, why don't we think they're still interested in doing it now?