Colossal Waste of Time and Money

After thoroughly skimming through the Mitchell Report, reading way too many news stories and blog posts, seeing way too many talking heads on TV and reading the first vehement denial of said report, this is my conclusion. George Mitchell ripped off Major League Baseball.

It's probably not his fault, Mitchell was sent on a fool's errand, by a fool (Bud). The report has been out there now for a little over 13 hours and I've been scratching my head trying to think what we know now that we didn't know then. Honestly, I don't think we know a whole hell of a lot more. It's believed that the probe cost MLB somewhere in the neighborhood of $20 million to conduct. TWENTY MILLION? And what we got back was a 409-page document basically running down a history of the reported incidents of PED use by Major League Baseball players (at least he included the footnotes), and the testimony of one attendant facing a "talk or else" ultimatum from the Feds, and a trainer who publicly vehemently denied that Roger Clemens and Andy Pettitte used PEDs as recently as June only to change his tune when talking to Mitchell. Again, the Feds put pressure on him to "Tell the truth to Mitchell," but when a guy makes public statements saying one thing, then tells this "investigator" the opposite, doesn't he lose all credibility?

Before this report came out, we all speculated about a number of players, some of those names were in this report, but most were not (Sammy Sosa, Brady Anderson and Luis Gonzalez come to mind). The only sources he had were the two aforementioned ancillary figures, and what we're left with is a few more guys on our list of "probably did roids," and just as many unanswered question as we had 14 hours ago.

Here's my question to you. Which was a bigger waste, the $50,000 per page MLB paid to have George Mitchell interview two busted drug dealers and write up a pretty report, or the $23,444.83 the Yankees paid Carl Pavano per pitch over the course of his career as a Yankee?