As much as I hate seeing rampant steroid use in baseball, this Mitchell report is garbage. Some of the accusations, especially against Clemens, are serious and damning, but the idea of picking out forty some odd players for something utterly permitted by the entire culture is dubious at best.

Now lets look at who George J Mitchell is—former Senator from Maine and current member of Boston Red Sox front office management. Yes—I was stunned to hear it as well, a very interesting and underreported fact. This so-called impartial Mitchell Report was conducted by a man on the Red Sox payroll.

The problem with his report is its selectivity. Mitchell went after certain people and exposed them, leaving baseball’s complicity to hang on the necks of a select few. The targeting of Clemens may not be so much against the Yankees, as it’s clear the accusations begin with the Blue Jays, right after Clemens left the Red Sox on bad terms.

The Red Sox rationale for turning on their star pitcher was that he was done, gassed out. So Clemens turned around and won three Cy Young awards. Steroid aided Cy Young awards—well, maybe not the first one from 1997. But the others were steroid aided. Take that, everyone but the Red Sox.

In fact, the report seems to out someone significant on virtually every team but the Sox, especially players from the Yankees championship run, mostly accusing blatantly good men like Any Petite of using HGH before 2003, when it was both legal in MLB and under the law.

Anyone with eyes knows Barry Bond’s steroid abuse went way too far. Those same people know many in baseball look a bit too built, muscles a little too swollen, tempers a little too short (Jason Veritek). But feigning impartiality on this report is a joke. Mitchell had his targets and he went for them, hard. For the sake of baseball fans, we’ve got to get past the steroid era, through serious testing and intolerance. Not by commissioning a career politician to do a partisan hit.