by David Wysocki

Created on: January 09, 2008   Last Updated: October 31, 2008

The release of former senator George Mitchell's report on the use of performance enhancing drugs in Major League Baseball (MLB) was an important day for the sport and fans wholly let out a collective "finally" under their breath. To say, however, that the Mitchell Report will ruin baseball or its credibility in the eyes of the media and fans would be pretty naive and would largely be insulting the intelligence of anyone who follows the sport.

It has not been a secret to anyone that drug use in professional sports, and particularly baseball, has been a large problem for a long time. For those that weren't skeptical by the Brady Anderson's and Albert Belle's of the world in the mid-90's, there were the Luis Gonzalez's, Mark McGwire's and Sammy Sosa's of the late '90's. Anderson, a former outfielder for the Boston Red Sox, Baltimore Orioles, and Cleveland Indians played between 1988 and 2002. In his first eight seasons in the league he averaged just nine home-runs a season. In 1996, he managed to knock out 50. This was a time where 50 homers was simply not a big deal anymore. Gonzalez has a similiar story. In nine seasons in the big leagues Gonzalez had hit a career high 23 homers and in that period held a career batting average near the high .260's. In 1999, he began a torrid streak at the plate. From 1999-2003 Gonzalez was elected to the all-star game four times. In those five years he batted below .304 just once (.288) and managed to average 33.6 homers a season and even hit out a monstrous 57 in 2001. He also made the MVP balloting three times in this run and drove 100-plus runs in each of those seasons. The McGwire and Sosa stories are also not new.

After the BALCO scandal was revealed in "Game of Shadows" by Mark Fainaru-Wada and Lance Williams, Barry Bonds, the face of the era because of his complete destruction of all home-run records, and a slew of more names were revealed in March of 2006.

The fans knew and accepted these terms. What's the key component here? The timing. The Mitchell Report was released in late 2007, far after everyone in the baseball universe knew of the steroid problem. The real success of the report was the fact that we saw some accountability and at least some guys get punished, not by Major League Baseball or the courts, but by public embarrassment and scrutiny. Even if there was a questioning of the guard relating to steroids, it would have happened when this information was new or fresh. Some of the names in the Mitchell Report may

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