Scott Bremner

The Mitchell Report critical of the misuse of steroids and human growth hormones throughout pro baseball spends a lot of time naming names, and in our celebrity driven world the question of who’s who on the list is taking a lot of the media attention.

I certainly don’t hold those players blameless for their actions, but c’mon.

This goes a lot deeper than that.

Let’s go back for a moment to August 12th, 1994.

Major League players had just walked off the job, which led to the cancellation of the first post season by any major American sport due to labor issues.

The owners, citing dwindling finances and a growing disparity between the haves and the have-nots, pushed for a salary cap that the union would not accept.

The strike lasted 234 days, until April of the next year when a federal ruling went against the owners and the players returned under the conditions of the old agreement.

But fans were leaving in droves, tired of the greed they saw on both sides from whiny millionaires unable to split more money than the fans would ever see in their lives.

The game was back but the interest was waning.

Something had to happen to save the sport.

And something did, in the form of a majestic home run boom that saw forty year old records fly away as easily as a mid-80’s fastball in the hands of a new breed of muscled warriors with names like Sosa, and McGuire and suddenly, Bonds.

Even pitchers whose numbers had started to slip found new life late in their careers, the Pettittes and Clemens whose late rebounds were credited to drive and off-field conditioning.

Am I saying that there was some overt, direct plan from ownership to get players to “juice up” to save the sport?

Of course not.

It smells a lot more like a conspiracy of silence, a wink-and-nod, don’t ask-don’t tell atmosphere that benefited the suits as well as the individual players’ career length.

It seems awlfully hard to believe that executives who have given their professional lives to understanding and studying a sport and the people who play it could be that blind to something that widespread.

Impossible, in fact.

There will be a lot of gnashing of teeth in the weeks to come and calls to cross out milestones and kick alleged offenders out of the Hall.

But for my two cents there is a lot of blame to go around in baseball, from the dugout straight up to the owner’s box, and you have to wonder if the needle fix for the sport in the 90’s could come back to do more harm than good to the game in the long run.