NEW YORK — The Mitchell Report exposes a “serious drug culture within baseball, from top to bottom,” fingers MVPs and All-Stars and calls for beefed-up testing by an outside agency to clean up the game, The Associated Press learned Wednesday.
The report by former Senate Majority Leader George Mitchell will include names of 60 to 80 players linked to performance-enhancing substances and plenty more information that exposes “deep problems” afflicting the sport, one of two sources with knowledge of the findings told the AP. Both sources said the report would not address amphetamines.
One person familiar with the final version would only speak anonymously but described it as “a very thorough treatment of the subject” and said some aspects were surprising. He said the report assigns blame to both the commissioner’s office and the players’ union.
MLB’s “not going to love it, the union’s not going to love it,” he said.
The report comes at the end of a year when San Francisco Giants outfielder Barry Bonds broke the career home run record, only to be indicted three months later on charges of lying to a federal grand jury about steroid use.
One source said that while the report will cite problems “top to bottom,” it also will expose “deep problems, the number of players, high-level MVPs and All-Stars,” as well as clubhouse personnel who allowed steroids and other banned substances in clubhouses or knew about it and didn’t say anything.
None of the player names had leaked out Wednesday night.
The rest of the report, the sources said, will focus on recommendations that include enhanced year-round testing and hiring a drug-testing company that uses the highest standards of independence and transparency. Baseball’s program currently is overseen by a joint management-union Health Policy Advisory Committee, with an independent administrator approved by both sides.
The report also is expected to recommend that baseball develop a credible program to handle cases with evidence of athletes receiving or taking drugs but not testing positive for them.
Just last week, Kansas City’s Jose Guillen and Baltimore’s Jay Gibbons were suspended for the first 15 days of next season, and media reports said they had obtained human growth hormone in 2005, after baseball banned it.
Mitchell, a Boston Red Sox director, planned to release his report at 11 a.m. (PDT) today at a news conference in New York City.
Baseball commissioner Bud Selig will hold his own news conference 2½ hours later.
Much of the first part of the report will be based on evidence obtained from former New York Mets clubhouse attendant Kirk Radomski, and from information gleaned from the Albany district attorney’s investigation into illegal drug distribution that focused on Signature Pharmacy of Orlando, Fla., the sources said.
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