The Mitchell Report

The release of a report prepared by former Senate Majority Leader George Mitchell for Major League Baseball was highly anticipated last week, not for its core findings or broad conclusions but for the list of current and former players identified as users of performance-enhancing drugs.

Even the most casual baseball fan knows that the game has been juiced for years. The transformation of record-setting players including Barry Bonds, Mark McGwire, Jose Canseco, Lenny Dykstra and Roger Clemens made even the most cynical suspicions seem reasonable. Comparing the physiques of 1980s superstars such as Ozzie Smith, Keith Hernandez and Mike Schmidt to starters on any of today’s perennial losing clubs makes the mountain of circumstantial evidence grow even taller.

No, this show was about naming names.

But for all the attention given to each athlete mentioned in the Mitchell Report, one name in particular has thus far escaped much criticism: Donald Fehr.

Mr. Fehr is the longtime executive director of the Major League Baseball Players Association, one of the strongest labor groups in the United States. Over the past couple of decades, the players union has whipped up on management and team owners as though they were the Tampa Bay Devil Rays.

The union, whose members saw their salaries skyrocket during the steroid era, refused to cooperate with Mr. Mitchell. The report gives a few indications as to why.

An unnamed player told Mr. Mitchell that Gene Orza, the union’s chief operating officer, advised the athlete of a positive test result in 2003 and then warned that player that additional testing was imminent.

Mr. Fehr said Mr. Orza told him he did not recall any such conversation.

Then, in 2004, the union wrangled a moratorium on drug testing in an attempt to slow the momentum behind various legislative investigations, according to the report. Mr. Mitchell was unable to specify the length of the moratorium. Mr. Fehr acknowledged that he obtained a moratorium, but said all players eventually were tested that year.

So the players union not only resisted the imposition of drug testing, but might have worked actively to undermine the integrity of the testing program once it was put in place.

To be sure, there’s plenty of blame to go around here. Fans largely ignored the signals that some players had an illicit edge in putting up gaudy statistics and bought tickets in record numbers. That interest translated into a much larger pile of money for owners, players and agents. The players association and its efforts to protect its members at all costs — damaging the institution of baseball in the process — can’t be forgotten in this discussion.

As Commissioner Bud Selig plans a response to the Mitchell Report, it would be in the best interests of all parties for the union to finally, formally embrace testing for banned performance-enhancing drugs and the punishments that aim to deter players from using them.

Instead, the union should save its punches for any attempt to strike individual records from the history books. Mr. Selig is foolish if he thinks he can simply erase an era of remarkable achievement from the country’s consciousness, like some Stasi chief destroying photos and records to make a hated dissident “disappear.”

The NCAA and the Olympic Games routinely engage in such silly practices, revoking banners and medals as though they were never given out. Any punishments issued by Major League Baseball should impact the present and the future, not try to change the past.