The Mitchell Report came out this week, exposing the names of many baseball players who used performance-enhancing drugs. They listed 86 players, but there's probably a lot more, as Mitchell didn't seem to have many sources. Players named feel into a few broad categories:
1. Bay Area players implicated as BALCO customers.
2. Players who bought drugs from former Mets bat boy Kirk Radomski.
3. Players implicated by former player Larry Bigbie.
4. Players discovered in the course of an investigation into Florida pharmacies and clinics.
5. Players named by trainer Brain McNamee (Roger Clemens and Andy Pettite).
This says to me that there's a lot of other PED users in baseball that didn't come up in this report. The report is heavy on former A's, Mets, Orioles, and especially Giants, but unless this bat boy was the lone source for steroids in MLB, there's a lot more names out there.
The Giants specifically had a lot of terrible relief pitchers that turned out to be juicing. They were awful, yet cheating all the while. Finding out these players were cheating is like learning that Steve Buscemi got a face lift. Among those pitchers were:
- Jason Christiansen, who threw 126 innings in his four years with the team, with a 4.57 ERA. For this performance, Christiansen earned a little over eight million dollars. He's most famous for getting into a fight with Barry Bonds when Bonds threw Coca-Cola on him.
- Mike Stanton, who earned eight saves with the Giants at the tail end of 2006, before helping the Dodgers win the wild card at the end of the year. Fun quote in that story: Brian Sabean claims that the Giants will not have any high-salary signings in the off-season, a few months before signing Barrys Bonds and Zito to mega-deals.
- Matt Herges, mentioned in this space as one of the Rockies' Refugee All-Stars, and as a horrible, horrible pitcher back in 2007.
One wonders what these pitchers might have done absent the performance-enhancing drugs. Would they have thrown pitches underhand, and let batters choose the location, all while burning piles of the owner's money and telling embarrassing secrets about the catcher? All i know is that I won't be satisfied until all of Matt Herges's pitching statistics are expunged from the record books, and as such, the Giants are retroactively awarded the 2004 National League West title.
