Where's the punishment?

No punishment; it's a crime

Friday, March 07, 2008
By Gene Collier, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette



Bud Selig and Donald Fehr

Seven weeks have elapsed since Bud Selig squirmed before Congress in the wake of the Mitchell Report and promised a thorough investigation of the game's management practices, particularly those of the San Francisco Giants, and the continuous silence from the commissioner's office is deafening.

Three weeks remain until the effective end of spring training, which is when Bud said he'd hoped to have a lot of the Mitchell Report's recommendations in place to help baseball reclaim its integrity, and still, no news is bad news.

People have begun to wonder aloud, as maybe we all should, when anyone in baseball's senior management will be held accountable for what is now the well-documented steroids era. In what is its post-steroids era mostly by hope, in which players appear to be paying the full price of ruined reputations, isn't it past time that the game identify and discipline the people, as Bill Rhoden said in the New York Times this week, "who turned the blind eye."

Again, don't hold your breath.

The day after Selig and Players Association Zen master Don Fehr entered soft guilty pleas to Congress in the worst "if we'd but only known then what we know now" tradition, baseball's 30 team owners presented Selig with a new contract that runs through 2012, worth I'm guessing $75 million.

All in all a pretty good outcome for someone who should have been fired.

In his 15 years, Selig's watch included the pernicious proliferation of steroids, human growth hormone and who knows what else in the sport, the trashing of its most sacred records by drug cheats, and all manner of corrosive impacts to the game's standing as a hallmark of American culture.

Of course, I might have mentioned that a time or two.

What we're waiting for now is a head to roll from atop somebody's white collar, if for nothing else but to offset the wailing of pathetic players caught in the web of their own deceit.

Were the Lords of the Game actually upset by all this, would Giants general manager Brian Sabean still have a job?

Sabean watched Barry Bonds turn into Godzilla before his very eyes, and, even when prodded to do something by the club's athletic trainer, even when asked specifically if there was "a problem" by his owner, effectively shrugged and snoozed until Bonds owned the game's home run records.

Within the Mitchell Report, and in "Game of Shadows," Stan Conte, the Giants' head athletic trainer, emerges as highly suspicious of Greg Anderson, Bonds' personal trainer, who turned out to be a drug mule. When Conte asked Anderson for a resume, Anderson produced a piece of paper indicating that he was a high school graduate and that everything else was "pending." There was no evidence, according to Mitchell, that Anderson had "any education or experience that would qualify him to train a professional athlete."

Yet between March 2002 and Feb. 12, 2004, when Anderson was indicted, he visited the Giants' clubhouse 94 times and traveled with the club. When Conte approached Sabean to complain about Anderson, Sabean suggested that Conte confront Anderson and Bonds. Conte refused, feeling it wasn't his responsibility. When another player Conte wouldn't identify to Mitchell asked him if he should buy steroids from Anderson, Conte lectured against it and reported the player to Sabean, who again did nothing.

But I guess Sabean was only doing what baseball was doing, which was nothing.

In spring training of 2001, according to the Mitchell Report, the director of security for the commissioner's office, Kevin Hallinan, was lecturing team physicians and athletic trainers when Barney Nugent, an assistant to Conte, complained about the out-of-control situation with the Giants. Hallinan reportedly said, "We're going to do something about this; it's an issue we know what you're talking about."

What was done? Nothing.

It wasn't just Bonds. Bobby Estalella, Marvin Benard and Benito Santiago availed themselves of drug conduits to and from and within the Giants' clubhouse without any impediment.

If the commissioner elects not to discipline the Giants, what chance is there he'll have something painful to say to the New York Yankees, where general manager Brian Cashman might well have overseen the clubhouse that set the American League record for most cheats per cubicle: Roger Clemens, Andy Pettitte, Jason Giambi, Gary Sheffield and Chuck Knoblauch?

The front offices of the Giants, the Yankees and the Baltimore Orioles, where Larry Bigbie, Brian Roberts and Miguel Tejada flourished, are just three franchises virtually aching for discipline as a result of the Mitchell Report. Whether or not they get any, or to what degree, might be the most telling outcome of the whole sordid mess.

First published on March 7, 2008 at 12:00 am