Ray Ratto: Selig, as ever, a step slow

Ray Ratto
The San Fransisco Chronicle
Thursday, March 30, 2006

Once upon a time, George Mitchell was considered a candidate to become commissioner of baseball. He wasn't much of a candidate, though, because we know that baseball owners still like to fix their meetings, and outsiders tend to stay that way.

So Bud Selig got the job instead, and now Mitchell is the big name among the people who are going to run the shiny new investigation into steroid use and performance enhancement in baseball.

Sounds like Mitchell was one lucky loser. I mean, it could have been the other way around, and he could have been the one hemming and hawing and putting out releases announcing the season-long Barry-Fest.

The announcement comes today, and the intent of the Selig Administration seems to be to get the monomaniacal media focus off Bonds himself while looking to attack a problem that is allegedly in the past.

So let's call this what it is -- the real Game of Shadows, after the troublesome pamphlet of the same name.

The investigation is supposed to go, well, wherever it goes, but given that the book has enumerated what happened in one laboratory, it is hard to know just where the investigation is supposed to go beyond what Mark Fainaru-Wada, Lance Williams and the boys and girls at Gotham Publishing already have provided.

In other words, this will be an uncomfortable time for Bonds, Gary Sheffield and Jason Giambi. All the other players mentioned in the book are now out of baseball, and all the other players who have used (or are still using) performance enhancers aren't in the book.

So why is this investigation anything more than a really involved book report? An excellent question, that.

Everything about Selig's interest in the steroid story has come after BALCO news, and his (and therefore the game's) reactions have been routinely hesitant and insincere, unless there was a way to bring in the players' union to share the blame. It surely can be said that there would have been no investigation of the sort being announced today if not for the seamlessness and unassailable thoroughness in reportage, and the utterly convincing narrative that drives the book. Put another way, you could blow $26 in lots worse ways.

Indeed, there have been other books about steroids in the game, most notably Howard Bryant's "Juicing the Game," a fairly thorough overview of the story, but none of those spurred Selig out of his clinical torpor on the subject. No, it took this one -- in fact, news of the planned investigation was released two days after the authors did 12 minutes on David Letterman, which suggests at least circumstantially that it took Selig this long to realize that the book had made a serious impact across all segments of the nation -- except of course for here, Bonds' own Little Switzerland.

Thus, we can assume, George Mitchell's reputation for honor and veracity notwithstanding, that the breadth of this investigation will be kept as narrow as possible, widened only if the public actually demands it. It is baseball's way to do nothing until it is shown that a problem won't go away, and then to deal with it as halfheartedly as possible.

Unless, of course, money is involved. Then, the baseball folks spring into action like the cast of Cirque du Soleil with a snootful of nandrolone.

In other words, barring a public backlash and the rules of evidence, this investigation will follow only the trail of the footnotes in the back of the book, because there is no other place for the investigators to go. For all the players who are suspected of using the junk to prolong and improve their careers, only Bonds, Sheffield and Giambi end up being truly vulnerable, which your morning paper told you some time ago.

Of course, this might be a bleak picture we paint here. Perhaps this investigation will be more than we suspect it is -- grout for a leaking shower. Maybe George Mitchell will, by the power of his intellect and doggedness, actually expand the trail, or at least find facts independent of those we already paid to read. Maybe this is more than merely an elaborate book report for him.

If he manages that, if the game comes closer to distancing itself from the public health nightmare it has avoided, then baseball will be the poorer for his having never been named commissioner way back when.

If not, well, you know the old baseball saying -- nothing ventured, nobody the wiser.